Stolen Voices is an ongoing inquiry by Johanna Linsley and Rebecca Louise Collins, with rotating collaborators, inspired by eavesdropping.
The work imagines public spaces as semi-fictional constructions, as if an Agatha Christie novel has shattered over a town and fragments caught in the local soundscape. Summoned to these spaces, the artists seek access, navigate pathways and decode traces of an as-yet-undefined event. Stolen Voices particularly investigates the UK coast. The sense of borders and border crossings, evidence of lost technologies, shifting economies and ways of life, and the romance of the sea – all of these add up to prime eavesdropping territory. The project takes a variety of forms, from participatory workshops to new music composition, experimental performance, community gig nights, an installation called the Eavesdropbox, and a book project currently in process which we call a sonic detective novel.
Stolen Voices has been supported using public funds from the Arts Council England. It was initiated in 2014 as a Live Art Development Agency DIY project, in association with Sound & Music and Arts Bournemouth. The project is currently being commissioned as a Silver City Stories project, with support from Aberdeen City Council, the University of Aberdeen and Visit Aberdeenshire, in partnership with Aberdeen Performing Arts. In Autumn, 2017, the project will receive support from the Live Art Development Agency, SPILL Festival and Snape Maltings. Previous supporters include Helix Arts and East Durham Creates.
Rebecca Collins is a practice led researcher based in the Scotland who works in a transdisciplinary and international context across the fields of performance studies, and sound. Her practice, grounded in specific sites or communities, investigates the relationships between social, political and cultural phenomena. She is interested in how critical, fictional and performative interventions might cultivate attention towards our contemporary condition indicating potential levers for change.
Rebecca is co-organiser of Women In Sound/Women On Sound (WISWOS), a research network which tackles inequality and gender bias in the sonic arts. She is lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh.
https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/rebecca-collins
@CollinsRebeccaL
Johanna Linsley is an artist, researcher and producer with an interdisciplinary approach focusing on performance. Her work is iterative and research-based and she often makes projects with multiple versions or outcomes. She is a founder of the London-based performance collective I’m With You, which investigates queerness, domesticity, private life and public space. She is also a founding partner of UnionDoc, a centre for experimental documentary in Brooklyn, New York. She is a research associate at the University of Bristol and also works at the University of Roehampton.
To pass on tips, clues, rumours, red herrings, plot twists, or other useful sounds – or to get more information on the project – email yourstolenvoice@gmail.com