Radio Papesse

Laura Malacart lives and works in London, UK.

Voicings is born out of the need to expose how language can be indirectly used to oppress people when a foreigner is forced, as in the case of political refugees or economic migrants, to become a subject in another culture.
In London Laura Malacart worked with two sets of people who never meet: a group of refugees from an English language class and a group of white British actors. I asked the refugees to write a short account of their difficulties caused by language barriers when they first came to the UK. These texts become the ‘scripts’ to be learned by the actors: they must learn to enunciate them convincingly, including the errors, during a one-off recorded session.
In Santa Croce sull’Arno she worked with a group of economic migrants and a group of Italian actors: the outcome reveals a distinct role performed by the official language and a different reality of alienation.

Voicings (Italy) is the first radio version of a work that was born in video. As we have followed the production, which has been strongly influenced by Laura Malacart’s background in film making, it has been a great surprise for us to present a work that finds, in the radio space, a new freshness and new interpretive potential, dictated by Malacart’s skilled, sensitive and intense work on the single word and on the texts, on the compositional balance that unravels in her repetition and breaking down of the single word, within a narrative chainlike-structure where each story follows another, where each mistake adds meaning, rather than taking it away, where the voice, only the voice, gives body to a process of re-learning that, in this frame, unites the narrating self - the subject telling about him/herself - and the actor/actress. [Radio Papesse]

Voicings (Italy) is a work by Laura Malacart for Nuovi Paesaggi, a project by Radio Papesse and Villa Romana; it is produced by Radio Papesse and curated by Lucia Farinati.

A special thanks to Abedin, Adama, Amadou, Assane, Babita, Borana, Cheikh, Claudia, Dou Dou, Giorgi, Jaskirat, M'benglie, Nana, N'dao, Oumy, Rodrigo, Sofia, Valentina; to Vania Pucci, Renzo Boldrini, Simone Martini, Maria Paola Sacchetti, Maria Caterina Frani, Elisa Proietti, Maria Valeria Della Mea, Lorenzo Mucci, Paolo Giommarelli.

Thanks for supporting Voicings and helping us make it possible to: Municipality of Santa Croce sull'Arno, Associazione Arturo, Ilaria Mariotti, Teatro Verdi di Pisa, Teatro Studio Scandicci, Teatro del Maggio Fiorentino, Accademia della Crusca with Raffaella Setti and Paolo Belardinelli, Maria and Gualtiero Masini and Francesco Casciaro for Tempo Reale.