At Q-O2 we will return to the conversation that, seven years ago, after hours of listening, speaking, speaking-over, recording, replaying and transcribing, settled as a performance score for two voices. Accent, the piece that emerged, began as an attempt to understand our differing techniques of pronunciation by imitating one another’s accents (Antonia is from New Zealand, Emma from the UK). It became at once an enactment and discussion of our tactics, techniques and habits of speech. We listened to ourselves as we spoke, then listened again to the tapes, noticing anew the musicality of our shared hesitations, songful agreements and tetchy misunderstandings.
We return to this work – of conversing, of composing – after years spent on opposite sides of the world. Years in which the meaning of being ‘on the other side’ of a border, a continent, a ‘world’ has become, for us, newly politicised, newly difficult. Poeisis and transit, pronunciation and drift: Q-02 offers the site to sound out new and tricky ways of hearing our similar yet distinct ‘manners’ of speaking, of relating, of voicing our thoughts and identities. We return to the question of an ‘accent’ newly sensitised to the colonial histories shaping our personal stories, and the global politics of emigration and exile that can be heard in the localised inflections and acute tensions of everyday misunderstanding.