AND IT TASTES LIKE HAIR

Lisa Hall & Salomé Voegelin

Sound and text installation, journal article & performance

A collaborative work by Lisa Hall and Salomé Voegelin. The sound and text installation was created for Translating Ambiance exhibition at Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Melbourne (AU) 2019 as part of RMIT University research by Jordan Lacey. A subsequent reflective co-authored article was published in Unlikely Journal and performed at Coventry Biennale’s Talking About the Anthropocene symposium. 

The work is a sound and text installation of six mono headphone channels, a stereo speaker set up, timber boards, and lettra set words - it negates the ability to record nature from outside. Instead it wills entanglements in roots and leaves, on moss and air, and by the long grass and the thistle. It insists on our being together and of each other in a co-dependent interbeing, rather than allowing for the separation of being nature or being human. ​However, this interbeing is not a becoming plant, becoming wild, becoming other, in a colonial and territorial grasp. Instead it is an acknowledgement of sharing structures and molecules: the invisible traces we are all made of. The recordings are in the ear, on the hands and feet, and in the mouth, caressing and also slightly unpleasant. They perform textures and rhythms, close up - unintelligible but felt - impressing correspondences and a shared origin, and manifesting what we have in common rather than our difference. To make us feel our skin on their surface. And the recordist stumbles rather than controls the wilderness that she is too. She is where things meet as textures and surfaces, hairy, jagged, wilful and intractable, and definitively alive. Where both nature and human perform their matter together, breaching a dualistic world view and building a different imaginary from the encounter of small hairs, skin, stems and spikes.

The journal article text and performance are both documentations of an art work and an auto-ethnographic journey through the field of an embodied recording practice. They combine sound files, texts, transcripts and words to retrace, comment on and further narrate ‘And it Tastes like Hair’. The work emphasises nature and human in their performance of matter together. It plays in a space that it half builds, half dismantles, where they meet as textures and surfaces, hairy, jagged, wilful and intractable, and where they breach a dualistic world view in the encounter of small hairs, skin, stems and spikes. The article and the performance retrace the work’s steps and considers its construction from the sound of dry leaves crumbling; from the body recorded and overheard in the field; from a daughter’s descriptions of nature felt; with John Gough’s Meteorological Journal from 1808, kept in the archives of the Wellcome Trust that inspired its journey; and from the sound of the recording and play-back technology used.