TOT

Stichting Neverlike / Keren Levi (Netherlands) - Unmute

unmute is simultaneously dance, live music and a mesmerizing soundscape. You hear words in different languages, universal cries and computer-generated voices. All the sounds have been digitalised and separated from where they originated, emphasizing the value of every voice and touching on the worrying development in which precisely the right to free speech is being used to silence other voices. The musical composition manipulates the sound into a hallucinatory soundscape. It is like a dream in which you are standing still in a loud, pressing mass of people, while the space around you undulates and shifts in form.

Futuristic scene
unmute is inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, the influential political theorist of the post-war period. Arendt posited that a just society maintains a balance between communal and individual interests and that the validity of every voice is crucial in this. Levi and Kyriakides depict a futuristic scenario in which people and their voice have been separated for all time but where there is a longing to reunite communication and the sound of the voice with the personal and the body.

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