Emily Welther “)rituals of listening(” walk-in installation / participatory exhibition

) rituals of listening (

documents current listening practices as sound/compositions and vocal experiments, as clay-based sculptures, movement-writings and cyanotype photographs. Inherent to each is the aspect of touch.

This installation invites the audience to experience listening as a physical experience, as a journey that leaves visible and invisible traces, that exposes the unknown, that approaches other ways of perceiving, and through these, finds other, fluid ways of being.

Each mini-work or experiment is curated as a simple ritual; the invitation to change the position of the body; to form clay in intuitive, repetitive movements; to journey through hanging cyanotypes; to write while suspending language; to wander within sound-compositions and vocal experiments in binaural space. Each looks for ways of perceiving micro-movements and not-yet words; of listening for ways to expose, to touch and be touched.

How does the position of my body affect what and how I hear? How does the way I listen, and what I listen to, affect the perceptions of myself, of others around me, and of my surroundings? How might listening allow for other ways of perceiving and therefore other ways of being?

Reservation: info@emilywelther.com
Tel: +49 179 9955596

Concept and Creation: Emily Welther
Funded by: #TakeHeart, NeuStartKultur, Recherche Förderung, Fonds Darstellende Künste 2022, and NRW Soforthilfe Künstlerstipendium 2022.
Many thanks to Irina Baldini and Daz Disley
Selections of this installation were previously part of:
BBase: a body based space / 4bid Gallery, OT301 Amsterdam. September 2022
Vicarious Vocalities, Simulated Songs Conference / “Voices in and out of Place: Misplace, Displaced, Replaced and Interlaced Voices” / Centre for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, Newcastle University,
UK. September 2022

CV:

Emily Welther holds bachelors degrees in Drama from the Experimental Theater Wing of New York University and in Dance/Dance-Making from the European Dance Development Center, Arnhem, the Netherlands. She completed her Master of Performance Practices at ArtEZ in Arnhem in September
2021. Since moving to Cologne, Germany in 2004, Emily has worked extensively as a dancer/performer and teacher in the freelance scene there and throughout Europe, working continuously with Barbara Fuchs/tanzfuchs PRODUKTION in both productions for children and programs in education. She has recently performed her own work at festivals in the Netherlands and
in the UK, collaborating with musician Daniel Brandl for the live-streamed “INTERFACE” and developing “Body Horizontal” for X-Church in Gainsborough. She is currently part of “Body Matters”, a co-creation experiential residency with the Performance Art duo, VestandPage. Receiving research funding from Fonds Darstellende Künste, she was able to continue her experiments with live and
digital performance art, sound compositions and vocal explorations, exploring the sounds and voices that emerge when the human body and its environment come in closest contact. She is currently exploring audible, visual, and kinaesthetic ways of listening and letting these influence her artistic
practice and performance-making