Event
Piyok: Does Voice 'Break' the Archive?
31 May 2023
Regular hours
- Wed, 31 May
- 19:00 – 21:00
Free admission
Travel Information
- U9 Turmstrasse
Event map
Performance by Anjeline de Dios followed by talk with sound scholar and composer meLê Yamomo and curator Eva Bentcheva.
About
Piyok: Stimmbruch (De), breaking voice (En)In Tagalog (Filipino), the word piyok describes both the breaking of young men's voices during puberty, and the accidental cracking of the voice while singing high notes. In an experimental performance developed for the exhibition Talking Heads: Archival Echoes at Galerie Nord, vocal performer Anjeline de Dios embraces piyok as a metaphor for historical rupture between the Philippines and Germany. She invites listeners to ponder the idea of the voice in, and as, entrapment and breakage. The performance fuses live voice, Zoom transmission and historical sound recordings related to the Philippines from the Lautarchiv der Humboldt Universität.
The performance is followed by a conversation between de Dios, sound scholar and composer meLê Yamomo, and curator Eva Bentcheva. Drawing upon their different backgrounds, as well as Yamomo's current research project, Sonic Returns, with the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv and the Lautarchiv der Humboldt Universität Berlin, they ask whether voice and sound are ever completely 'trapped' within the colonial prisons of the European museums and archives, or if they are rather in a state of 'exile', waiting for repatriation.