“(...) Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”

Researching rock mythologies, I encounter numerous stories of outspoken women turned into a rock, losing their voices in the act. Echo, a witty nymph was punished and deprived of her voice, ultimately turned into a rock, unable to utter words of her own. Similar stories resonate in the mythologies of my native Poland, where many rock formations carry tales of - usually young, ‘emotional’ women, who were transformed into a rock, either by an act of punishment or through their own despair. 

In the revisionist act driven by a desire to rediscover these voices, I wonder: what would these rocks sound like, if had their voices back?

With the use of electrodes and a biodata sonification device, I collect data in real time from the surface of a rock which is then translated into a sound impulse. Each sound note is attributed a word from the “Cartographies of Silence” - the poem by Adrianne Rich - a feminist poet and essayist. Through the randomised, organic process of word extraction, the rock begins to develop its own, uncontrollable language.

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The work was developed as part of the Studio LOOS residency, under the mentoring support of Leonie Roessler, made possible with the Gemeente Den Haag fonds.