Frances Barrett

Voices are slippery objects, originating somewhere, yet apprehended elsewhere. Permanently situated at a spatial and temporal remove from source, they enter the world as they exit the body, at once embodied and disembodied, alive and dead. In this liminal zone, voices echo themselves, becoming mnemonic devices, summoning memories, hallucinations, and traumas.

Since 2007, Frances Barrett has worked with the multiplicity of the voice: as part of the collective Barbara Cleveland, through delegated performances, and in immersive sound installations. Less a composer than a sonic dramaturg, her work is steeped in theatre, collaborating with performers to develop experimental methodologies as opposed to concrete outcomes.

This is especially evident in collaborations with vocalist Joanna Fabro. A Song for Katthy (2022) is for Katthy Cavaliere, a performance artist who passed away in 2012. To initiate this project, Barrett researched Cavaliere’s archives held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In her extensive diaries, Cavaliere would describe ‘the hole’: a psychic and emotive space where she felt held in communion with her late mother. (1) These words produced a powerful sonic image for Barrett, who had been exploring ‘orifice-oriented’ thematisations of holes in, out, and through the body.

Barrett conceptually conjoined ‘hole’ with ‘mouth’, elucidating a kind of haunted cavity from which voices might emerge, spiralling out into the world. Mouth and voice are entangled entities, as Brandon LaBelle notes: ‘The mouth is wrapped up in the voice, and the voice in the mouth, so much so that to theorize the performativity of the spoken is to confront the tongue, the teeth, the lips, and the throat.' (2) Yet if mouths are irreducibly material, voices are, conversely, relational. Barrett was struck by a passage from Adriana Cavarero that seemed in dialogue with Cavaliere’s experience, marked by the loss of her mother: ‘The voice is always for the ear, it is always relational; but it is never as relational as it is in the first cry of the infant.' (3)

In A Song for Katthy, Fabro embodies both mother and child, channelling a double-voiced subjectivity that cries, gags, bleats, whimpers, exhorts, and ultimately screams, in desperation and longing; voices are never fully heard, and will always recede into silence. This is neither good nor bad, but a condition of materiality and relationality. Roland Barthes writes, ‘Isn’t the entire space of the voice an infinite one?’ – by which he means inexhaustible and not reducible to easy truths. The voice is infinite because it holds ‘voices within the voice’, standing for multiple subjectivities. (4)

(1) ‘Perhaps while I was in the hole today, I was being held there by them all’ – Katthy Cavaliere, Art Gallery of New South Wales, MS2016.14, Box Six, Diaries 2005–2011.
(2) Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth : Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2014, p.1.
(3) Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005, p.169.
(4) Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, London, 1977, p.184.