‘Unruly Voices’ Symposium

To launch and build on the publication of its Issue 7: ‘Unruly Voices’, Nicole Bachmann and guest editor Kamayani Sharma announce a symposium that explores vocality through a new materialist lens.

What is the voice beyond speech and language?

How does it move between human and more-than-human bodies, technologies, and environments?

What does it do – epistemically, artistically, socially, and politically?

This symposium takes this set of questions as a starting point for exploring its multiple dimensions and possibilities.

Rather than approaching voice as a neutral medium of communication, it asks how it grounds, reveals, produces, and disrupts structures, relations, and forms of agency.

The programme will bring together a range of theoretical, artistic and experimental contributions: talks by Milla Tiainen and Ruby Hembrom; a voice bath by Manuela Barczewski; a presentation by Kamayani Sharma; a video essay by Nicole Bachmann and readings from DEARS’ Issue 7: ‘Unruly Voices’.

We envision the symposium as a space for shared inquiry into voice as something that emerges not simply from us, but between us.

12.09.2026

10 am – 5 pm CET

Cabaret Voltaire

Spiegelgasse 1, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland

This symposium is supported by a Pro Helvetia Co-Creation Grant 2025 awarded to Nicole Bachmann and Kamayani Sharma for their multi-part collaborative project Transcontinental languaging: decolonising voice, orality, and embodied language.

Programme:

Milla Tiainen

How does voice matter with new materialisms?: Some propositions 
This presentation provides an introduction to the aims and propositions of the essay collection Mattering Voices: Studying Voice Through New Materialisms (Routledge 2025). The volume was co-edited by Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Anne Tarvainen and Milla Tiainen, whose backgrounds pertaining to the study of voice span artistic research, ethnomusicology and musical performance studies. In addition, the voice research of the contributors represents educational studies, feminist and gender studies, musicology, performance philosophy and sound studies.

Kamayani Sharma

Writing Aloud: Text, Voice and Criticality
This presentation explores a simple question: what is the relationship between writing and voice? Moving between text-based and audio-based criticism, it traces a shift from the written and read to the spoken and heard. The recording script and the transcript embody the intermedial promise of these passages. The space between text and speech signals the possibility of criticism as conversation — not a solitary exercise, but something polyphonic, horizontal and alive to the urgencies of voice, a way of orienting oneself through practices of art, language and life itself

Manuela Barczewski

Voice bath session
Manuela will be conducting a 35 min long voice-bath session comprising toning with vowel sounds and overtone singing. Overtone singing is a particular technique where the voice makes more than one audible tone at the same time. The voice-bath will finish with therapeutic percussion. The session is designed to support relaxation, reflection and wellbeing. Participants can immerse themselves in a session of deep listening and relaxation.

Ruby Hembrom

When Voice Is Withheld: Orality, Latency, and Adivasi Epistemologies

This presentation explores the relationship between silence, memory, and agency in Adivasi worlds. Rather than understanding silence as absence or erasure, the talk examines how voice is sometimes strategically withheld in response to histories of colonial extraction, misrepresentation, and epistemic violence

Nicole Bachmann

Listening session ‘question as (…)’, 2025

your teeth

slightly closed

still held

captive

on my outer edges

fringes

barely held

Readings and sound performance from DEARS’ Issue 7: ‘Unruly Voices’

Reading by Alice Speller, A new voice

Reading by Giulia Ottavia Frattini, Enduring the question

Sound performance by Swantje Lichtenstein, SOUNDS OF UNDEAD WORDS

Participant bios (in order of presentation):

Milla Tiainen is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Turku, Finland, and Associate Professor (title of Docent) of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. Her research and teaching span musical performance studies, interdisciplinary voice studies, cultural studies of music and sound, and new materialist and posthumanist research approaches to the study of arts, the senses and intersectional gender.

Kamayani Sharma is a writer, podcaster and researcher with a focus on visual culture, art and media. She is currently podcast producer for Sharjah Art Foundation.

Manuela Barczewski is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and voice facilitator in holistic voice practices. She is currently completing her training at the British Academy for Sound Therapy (BAST).

Ruby Hembrom is an Adivasi (Indigenous from India) cultural documentarian and practitioner. She is the founder of adivaani (first voices) – an archiving and publishing outfit of and by Adivasis – and a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Nicole Bachmann is an artist based in Zurich and London. She works across video, text, sound, installation and performance. Her practice focuses on the voice and its political and social potential to disrupt power structures and create new meaning.

Alice Speller is a writer and visual artist whose work speaks to and through the body, exploring the material boundaries of identity. She is currently working on two collections of writings, due for publication later this year. 

Giulia Ottavia Frattini is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her practice weaves together (meta)writing, critical theory, and poetics through anti-narrative forms. Attuned to voice and language as unstable materials, she experiments with their reconfiguration through shifting modes of meaning-making.

Swantje Lichtenstein is an artist, musician, poet, curator. Her main interests are transtextual performative amplifications of language, voice, sound and theory as well as researching electro-acustic and conceptual recordings from a transmedial and feminist perspective.

10:00 Introduction Nicole/Kamayani, launch of magazine DEARS issue 7

10:30 1. Milla Tiainen, on Mattering Voices, zoom call, 45mins

11:20 2. Kamayani, listening series, podcast, form voice, 30-45mins

12:00 3. Voice Bath, Ela (overtones), 45mins

12:45– 13:45 Lunch Break

13:45 4. Ruby Hembrom 17:15 IST zoom call, 45mins

14:30 5. Nicole, audio piece, 15mins approx.

15:00 Tea break 20mins

15:20 Alice Speller, Giulia Ottavia Frattini

15:40 Swantje Lichtenstein

Launch and Drinks to celebrate issue 7