Fannie Lou Hamer, a Freedom Democratic Party delegate, leads the singing of freedom songs at Democratic Party convention.
“That Illiterate Woman”, is another piece for headphones. Headphones! Which I always avoid and have railed against within sound arts practices. Therefore this had to be special.
That Illiterate Woman was made in response to an invitation to take part in Folketone’s Profound Sound Festival, which features the art exhibition: Sight and Sound at the super Brewery Tap UCA art-space in Folkestone town centre. It is strange to make work remotely for a place you are not in, to think remotely in situ, and the work has taken on a “message in a bottle” quality, a thread, until sending it, an uncharted path opens up to expand into, creatively speaking. Similarly listening to it, a path back in time opens up for the listener, I feel, in a similar way.
This was an opportunity to continue with previously explored lines of thought: to engage with headphone pieces in a constructive way, after many years speaking up against sound works being arbitrarily presented on headphones, attached to the wall, competing with other ambient sounds in the gallery space. The last time I took part in the Sight and Sound festival during the Folkestone Fringe, I made a piece called Separate Engagements with the voices of Princess Diana and Prince Charles. The title is taken from one of Diana’s candid interviews about the crumbling of their marriage, in which the prince decided they should work different places and times, and conduct separate engagements. In both pieces, the sounds of the listeners (the interviewer or audiences) and the breaths between the words of the speakers themselves take a central if not the major role. In both pieces, opposing accounts of the same events are presented to listeners in different locations and different times. By listening to those different listeners, split over headphones, we resonate with the past and become the space for a third voice in the matter, namely, our own.
For “That Illiterate Woman”, I again looked for starkly opposing, historical audio testaments. Research led me to the exemplary life story of Fanny Lou Hamer, of which ample records exist, who lived and stood up in the most toxic of times and places.
Fanny’s humble background, epitomised the life of American sharecroppers, who were to all effect still slaves, in all but name, were everywhere in the Southern United States in the 1960s. This, despite the then President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act the same year. Hamer delivered a live televised address to the Democratic Party. This, in contrast with what she became through her own sheer willpower and faith, put paid to the awful reference and status given her by president Lyndon Johnson of “that illiterate woman.”
Fanny’s powerful lungs, her singing voice, and power of address carried her through an incredible series of hurdles just to register to vote, and her personal struggle inspired a movement. She became so renowned that the mighty, ‘enthroned’ Johnson embarrassed himself by calling an emergency, televised press conference, only to draw their attention away from Hamer’s own live televised address to the Democratic Party. Johnson then flummoxed the press by announcing nothing much to say of any import live on air, and so when played next to the vital, powerful address by Hamer, a third space arises with the energy of the audiences in the mix.
I became engaged with the different quality of sounds made by the crowds that listened and encouraged Fanny as she spoke, and worked around her powerful voice. Working with sound can make one a manner of archeologist, because we zoom in and expand silences and micro dusts that fell to the ground around the revealing words. The ambience in the outtakes after the speeches of both are canvases from which one can make out a portrait of the character of the speaker. This character is reflected in the breath and utterances of those being addressed, as well the spaces in which they are situated in that frozen moment in time: a church, town hall, a public square. As per my previous stereo headphone pieces, such as “Separate Engagements”, the audio creates a crucible in the mind of the listener, feeding left and right. Opinions are formed in this third space, as contrasting viewpoints arrive not just as words, but audio portraits on the same topic. Meet what I call the ‘auditorium of the mind’, where these polar opposites, or unuttered sounds manifest another, inner voice that hears and processes between the lines, between the breaths, between the speeches. A voice that is, namely, our own.
Installation shot of the piece at the Brewery Tap UCA
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