Diana Duta’s current research centres on the work of phonetician and inventor of the universal phonetic alphabet, Alexander Melville Bell. In the mid- 1860s, Bell came up with a rather complicated and now largely forgotten way of transcribing every possible sound into a symbol, starting from the position of the speech organs. His alphabet, called Visible Speech, was initially meant to help deaf people learn how to speak, thanks to its visual nature.
The starting point for the residency is a series of clay tablets inscribed with an aleatory sequence of symbols from Bell’s alphabet, representing both verbal and non-verbal sounds. As part of Notes to (), three of these artefacts were buried deep within the city’s foundations. For the residency at QO2, they re-emerge as scores, an aural persona rather than a cold, crumbly entity. They begin to sing, to spit, to quiver, to squeal.
Starting from the idea that we cannot see all angles of anything at the same time, or that we do not understand our present without taking some distance, Diana Duta has invited four voice performers to interpret the scores and create a partial documentation of the tablets, in a sound form.