Vox Humana

ARIANE
But as well as reflections, you discovered and uncovered sounds everywhere in the house, by in addition bringing a man and his voice into its hidden spaces, nooks and crannie. Why did you add the additional dimension of sound to your encounter with the house? Was the mirror and the looking not enough?


PATRICIA
I didn't add another dimension, I just wanted the sound dimension to be noticed in a house that had been in silence for so long. When I arrived in London, I had the chance to hear the British singer Phil Minton at an improvisation concert, and I instinctively knew that his work would fit perfectly into John's House. My proposal to him was that he should fill the spaces of the house with his voice - one man's voice, singing alone in the empty house. It made sense to me because of his own particular way of singing - with shouts, whispers, melodies, chords, words, and all the other possibilities of the human voice - which he could fit into this angry young (dead) man's rooms and corridors, library and cellar. Also Phil seemed right because of his presence and image: he looks like a true British gentleman. So the final result is a film made of several shorts, with Phil singing in the inner spaces of the house.

In a sense, Phil's work is inside mine, because I directed his movements through the space, and he improvised the sounds he put inside each room. I was curious about how the colours, the age, the light and the echoes of the old house would influence his singing. I choose mostly to film him singing directly in the space, rather than reflected in the mirror, because the sight and sound of this singing man was strong enough on its own to interfere with the house, without a mirror to distort it even further.

Again, the voice work is like the mirror reflections, because even if it explores a different sense, I was still filling the house with immaterial things, still respecting its emptyness....


ARIANE
But nonetheless, you were also filling the house with something very material - the body of a voice, discovering and uncovering the different spaces in the house. The sound is raw to the soul - a voice made of fissures, cracks, beats, breathes, cries, notes, dischords, creaks, groans, roars, whispers, slips, breaks, explosions. There is nothing refined - operatic or classically trained about Phil's voice,

Under the stairs, he rocks backwards and forwards, too and fro in a woodpecker action, hurling his voice against the diagonal slant upwards of the stairwell. In the cellar, his guttural growls and cries, ripped from deep inside him, fill this damp clammy low-slung void. And in passing through one door into another, it is his voice which goes first, as feet follow closely behind...a bodily voice in motion.

Roland Barthes in his essay ' The Grains of the Voice' says the voice is at its most unique in its breaks, uncertainties and its hidden reverberations. He could have been describing Phil's voice and Barthes goes onto say 'the grain is the body in the singing voice.' That's so true. It is so bodily.

In a way, your invitation to Phil to make an intervention in John's house could be described like this: you are putting a man's body back into the house where a man's body once belonged, by Phil responding to every crany of John's house, and to the memories, and feelings he senses embedded there, making new memories and feelings in sound.