Opening 5 November 2017, 17:00h

Opening Hours
Thu/Fri/Sat 16h – 19h

Bachmann’s new video-audioinstallation examines the relationship between language, voice and power and the singular voice within the plural. The piece deals with negotiations of speech within a group and the exploration of the singular as well as the communal voice. The materiality of gestures and the spoken word become an embodied vocabulary through which the performers navigate the construct of language and affirmation of their own expression.




Exhibition supported by
Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
Dr. Georg & Josi Guggenheim Stiftung
Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung
Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung

In relation to Nicole Bachmann’s new work I say, the artist together with Cathérine Hug and Dimitrina Sevova will discuss the wider implications of finding your voice and the political consequences this can have. But also think together and with the audience about artistic processes in this context, as well as reflect on the wider context of text-based, voice-based art works.

This event is part of Nicole Bachmann's personal exhibition at Corner College, I say.

I say explores the relation between the liveliness of the sound and the activity of listening by intensifying the microprocess of forming words so as to enunciate them. It unfolds the micropolitics of language structures in close relation to body movements in the plural and singular, to ask how the speech affects the body, instituting corporeal vulnerability and body resistance. The artist employs warm-up techniques of voice practices in actors’ routines, when they rehearse and test speech sounds in order to speak clearly during the performance. In Bachmann’s approach, the rehearsal is a performative situation evolving new emotions and affects in ever changing environments to mobilize the power of the voice with the materiality of the abstracting machine in the body in the variations between the combination of selected and collected words. In Samuel Beckett’s assertion, “make the limits of our language tremble,” one can grasp how I say produces a breathing space at the limit when the forms appear – a space of knowledge.
(Excerpt from the text on Nicole Bachmann's I say by Dimitrina Sevova; find the full text here)

Interview with Nicole Bachmann by Dimitrina Sevova