María Ruido, La voz humana, 1997
María Ruido
La voz humana

An artist, filmmaker, researcher and cultural producer, María Ruido (*1967, Spain) has been working on interdisciplinary media projects since 1996. Along with her artistic work, she developed an investigation of the imaginaries of labour in post-Fordist capitalism and the mechanisms of memory construction and its relations to different historical narratives. She is a professor at the Department of Design and Image at the University of Barcelona; she has written several studies questioning the politics of representation and its contexts and was an editor of the magazine Arte y Políticas de Identidad (Art and Identity Politics) in 2009.

artist's website: www.workandwords.net

The video performance La voz humana (The Human Voice) deals with the violence contained in language and how words operate in the public sphere and the limitations of discourses formed under imposed circumstances. Based on a passage from Miguel Cerceda’s book El origin de la mujer sujeto (The Origin of the Female Subject) from 1996, which talks about different linguistic spaces and how these are gendered, this video is an inquiry into the female voice (not always the artist’s, and in many cases reflecting stereotypical forms of speech). It proposes a fusion of body and language, beyond the non-critical assimilation of hegemonic paradigms and far from the ahistorical position of empty silence.

Courtesy María Ruido

Document media
Video, colour, sound, 7:00 min

Issue date
1997

Tags
language, patriarchy, voice