Anna Kinbom

In this performance which I made with Miyuki Inoue (NL/JP), me and Inoue experimented with sound, singing and safe spaces for performing. Our two pieces Karaoke Lecture and Humancicada met.

In Karaoke Lecture I invite the audience to sing along in songs I have written, I am interested in the ambiguous situation which appears when you choose to sing along or not, in the feelings which music evokes and a way of teaching through singing. Also when you sing in the art context, a context where maybe you are trained in a certain way, and used to act in a normative way inside the white cube. I am interested in norms too. In Humancicada Inoue invites the audience to make sound as cicadas, she is interested in how we are taught to sound in a specific way as humans, and she makes recordings of these events.

This performance we created at a residency at Malongen in Stockholm where I had invited Inoue and creative coder Marcel Smit (NL), for us to create a performance, with the concept Performance Center-PC which I formed in 2018 with Vilda Kvist, a thought place for performance in contemporary art.

We performed the piece at Supermarket Art Fair in October 2021. We began in a small room with windows towards Stadsgårdsterminalen and the water. First we invited the participants to make sounds as cicadas and record themself on their smartphones standing or sitting with moving boxes on their heads. While imitating the cicada sounds the participants listened to a recording Inoue had made of cicadas in a forest. After the recording the participants played their recordings simultaneously so we listened to them together as a humancicada choir in the room.

In the second part of the performance we listened to my song ”Singing in the water” together. Before this I described that we would then go out in the art fair and find a place where we felt safe and sing the song there by ourselves and record ourselves while singing and also take a picture of the place where one performed. After this everyone came back to the small room with the view to the water and there we listened to the recordings together at the same time like a choir. And that was the end of the performance.

With support from

NKF Malongen, The Nordic Art Association

Mondriaan Fund

Ogasawara Toshiaki Memorial Foundation