Cities And Memory

The Colonisation of Language: A Phraseology in Five Parts explores, in a broad sense, aspects of oral storytelling and how the influence of colonisation can corrupt language and the sense of an origin story through multiple iterations over time. In much of my sound work, I’m drawn to the spoken word, and was immediately drawn to the characteristics within the vocal utterances contained in the 1962 original field recording by Raymond Clausen of a Navel-Miel performance accompanied by shaken rattles and seed pods from Malekula, Vanuatu. Selecting snippets of these utterances with some of the percussive elements, I created a speculative language to run alongside the opening paragraph of the Brothers Grimm tale, Rapunzel (1812). I assigned an utterance to each word in the story and developed a version of this story "spoken" in this speculative language. Distinct phrases contained within the original narration are repeated and ‘corrupted’ through unlikely juxtapositions of these set phrases over the length of the