In the final installment of The Noon Sirens, Johanna Hedva gives over their Scream Demo (2021), a vocal piece that casts the body and its voice as an expression of the pleasure of refusal. Recorded in Hedva’s apartment during lockdown, the five-minutes-long track is all voice, with minimal effects of reverb and delay. Layered into a sonic composition that moves through different registers, Scream Demo demonstrates Hedva’s range, technique, and stamina, as they swing between the antipodal styles of opera and P’ansori, pushing into the possibility of vocal cord damage. In making this edge legible, and sometimes taking the body beyond it with all the attendant possibility of failure, Hedva invokes an inversion of normative Western values around what a voice should, and should not, sound like—and ultimately, what it can be used for. Scream Demo is from a larger body of all-vocal work-in-progress that Hedva is currently making.

Influenced by vocal traditions such as Korean P’ansori singing, where contrary to established Western criteria, signs of vocal damage are not seen as evidence of the voice or performer ‘losing’ something but rather evidence of what the performer has gained, Scream Demo insists on an aesthetic that foregrounds the wear and tear of the body as it moves through time. Rather than a voice kept pure and empyreal as though untouched by time, it insists that this worn-down, used-up, broken, and breaking sound in a voice is what’s beautiful.

There is pleasure, there is thrill, in pushing the body ‘too far,’ in inflicting marks upon it that are permanent and being in charge of making these marks on one’s own flesh. The body in this way is not a passive intermediary that separates the self and the world but an agential convergence; a body that bears the scars of struggle, of life, of the domination and oppression in our world, but is also constitutive of other realities, other systems of value and meaning. What happens, what power is reclaimed, when a person commands the fate of their own materiality? When something called ugly or deviant or dangerous retorts, “actually, no, I’m beautiful, well, and good”?

For Hedva, bringing this reversal into the space of art and cultural institutions is to challenge ableist imperialisms that are endemic to such institutions. Far from just a symbolic gesture, situating the politics of refusal so viscerally in their own body, they work against the conditioning they have themselves received, and enact a rebellion of kinked pleasure, wild thrill, play, and fun. To hear a voice intentionally and consensually pushed to breaking insists on another type of engagement with what a body is for, how it is valued, where it can go.

This, in turn, is constitutive of a new set of values and criteria and could be understood as an undercommons at work. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest an undercommons is not a place where we simply rebel and create critique—this antagonism would only serve to reify the dominant structures that produce the conditions we are protesting. Instead, an undercommons is a space and a time that is always already here. It is a space of commonality that does not seek to end the troubles we face but instead aims to end the world that could have imagined them in the first place. It frames, defines, and understands the world differently, according to a non-hegemonic system of values. A refusal of the very conditions within which we are inscribed is the establishment of another reality entirely—in the face of dominant categories and definitions, it simply says back, “no, I’m not that thing you say I am. I’m something else.”
–Lynton Talbot and Hana Noorali