Crip Vocality: Decoupling Voice from Mouth in Contemporary Art

An article in esse magazine examines how artists No Anger, Lou Chavepayre, and Anaïs Ghedini use crip approaches to challenge ableist conceptions of voice. Rather than focusing on vocal provenance, they emphasize shifts, mediations, and silences to question listening conditions. No Anger's film 'Dans ma voix, d'autres voix' (2024) presents their voice as plural and collective, incorporating laryngeal, synthesized, written, and others' voices. Ghedini's installation 'Voix-Fantômes courent sur les murs' (2023) at Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence, stages acousmatic voices through loudspeakers. Chavepayre's 'Cosmo' (2022) features a low-volume voice emanating from stones, with a psychic's vague statements undermining the authority of voice. The artists decouple voice from mouth and machine, revealing sutures in mediated speech. They avoid a restorative cyborg narrative, instead embracing an aesthetics of fragility and low tech. The works actualize 'crip technoscience' as defined by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, politicizing vocality by exposing discriminatory listening conditions and offering multiple, technological vocalities.