Her* Unspoken Languages – Silence as State Violence and Whistles of Resistance

A Listening-Performance by Franziska Koch, Chantal Küng & Anna Frei
With Rosa L., Ulrike M., Chelsea M., Onu Shiru Ke, Assata S., Tupamaras, Erithacus rubecula and many others.

Prison and jails are places of silencing, spaces where communication with the outside world gets interrupted or even made impossible. As a disciplinary tool, prison hides and silences what is unwanted in society, forms of otherness and lives of the other that are restricted and locked away. In this performance, voices and noises of women* who have all in their ways fought for a society that hears and makes space for all forms of the living, are being evoked.
Some of the voices have been silenced by ignorance and invisibility, some have endured the most cruel repressive procedures such as solitary confinement, where silence becomes the most horrifying noise, where silence is a signifier of state violence and where hegemonic language becomes a prison. Some have started to listen to and communicate with the only messengers from the outside world that could get past prison walls; the birds. Silence can not only be a tool for oppression; it can become, simultaneously, a path of resistance. Listening to silences, we are starting to understand.
The script has been published as an oor edition.