What to say, how to say, where to say, about writing around the poetic-sound collaboration with Pía Sommer.

Abstract

This text/sound performance aims to discuss writing problems that arise in the context of Artistic Research, concerning one’s sound production, and based on two electroacoustic interventions on sound poems by the Chilean artist Pía Sommer and a performative collaboration with her. By presenting these examples, along with the different reflexions that come along the process, I seek to showcase the achievements and obstacles of writing regarding these particular cases. The aforementioned writing problems forcefully emerged - sometimes as a paralyzing power - during my doctoral research. Faced with an (auto)ethnographic confusion, the (false) binary work/thesis, and the impossibility of a minimal critical distance, the triad of questions that titled this paper became coordinates of a writing journey in a methodological constellation where it was simple to get lost. The purpose of this text is to describe the results of that straving.