Voice

Description

Through a static close-up of a female figure submerged to her lips, filmed beneath the water surface, a nonverbal autobiographical story unfolds. A few sentences of the dialogue with an elderly person are conveyed through two-handed manual alphabet, which was also used before as a means of communication in social situations of desirable silence or enforced muteness. The blanks in the text emphasize omitted words as parts that are literally missing or lacking in communication. The exact order of the unwritten words reveals a way in which more productive communication could develop. The hidden meaning of the text itself refers to the position of the individual and his mute voice in modern society. Traditional manual narration integrated into silent video temporally brings closer the ways of communication, and in this way problematizes the frequent questions of merits and liabilities of modern communication. More often than not this problem is explained as a consequence of the methods and media of the information exchange of the technological age, ignoring in the process other causes and aspects of the same problem.