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MAYA NGUYEN

Based in Chicago, b. 1996, VN/RUS, Interdisciplinary Performer. Nguyen incorporates disparate (and often clashing) material sources into forms that remain conceptually indeterminate, such as performance lectures, sound improvisation, and participatory sculptural interventions. Her favored materials include: speech fragments, mistranslations, painful sounds, urban recordings, sounds imitating nature sounds, breast pump parts, internet debris, and videos of daily life.

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sound essay

I LOST MY MOTHER’S VOICE AND WOKE UP SCREAMING

Performance of live and archival voices (20min)

EXP / VOX
Tritriangle Gallery
Chicago,US April 2024

︎︎︎https://youtu.be/TelLSRZ4BmE

︎︎︎https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/a-sonic-geography-of-voice-a-review-of-exp-vox/

How does motherhood physically alter the voice? And how does genocide alter motherhood?

This work utilizes the affective registers of the voice that are central to our perception and memory of our mothers’ voices — humming, breathing, crying, whispering. And then this voice is pushed to its limit through improvisational sampling of recorded interviews of mothers in extreme circumstances. You hear a constellation of seemingly random words such as “big car,” “whoosh,” “fireworks” and “thunder.” Until you realize that these words are the various ways that mothers describe the sounds of bombs to their children.

Their sampled voices are improvisationally woven together in such a way that it becomes impossible to disambiguate between protector and victim, someone in control and someone helpless. Here, the mother’s voice is both whispering and screaming.