Rituals of Speaking
How do artists create space to invite, gather, and represent the voices of others?
Rituals of Speaking is a series of film-led projects that explores how artists represent the voices of others through collective storytelling, in turn inviting conversations around the nature of collectivity and how community is defined. With a self-reflexive awareness of their position and context, artists and filmmakers Helen Cammock, Dora García, Ephraim Asili and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo reorient the author-subject relationship through experiments with collaborative methods. Letting means dictate ends, they propose alternative frameworks for the practice of an ethics of care that centers the act of listening within the filmmaking process. Extending this dialogue to the viewer, these films embrace an open-ended plurality in narrative and form that continues to engage with the subjectivities and responsibilities of the artist as storyteller. In doing so, they respond to recurring questions over who speaks for whom in the stories we tell, redirecting our attention to how.
Presented across a variety of formats, these projects range from new commissions to early examples of community filmmaking. Each work will be accompanied by a series of public programs alongside a collection of related documents and ephemera.
Rituals of Speaking is a reference to Linda Alcoff’s essay “The Problem of Speaking for Others”, which analyzes the contexts in which speaking and being heard are made possible.
Image: Open Rehearsal by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo.
