Klara du Plessis

Scree/n
10.26–11.25.2023

Scree/n is a sound installation using a set of nine poems as raw material. The distinct poems are excerpted, interwoven, and re-curated into a new poetic work as an analogue remix of language. Scree/n relies on the voice—its metric, repetitive ability and its potential to distort or redirect itself as sound—with a deliberate lack of digital intervention, beyond the mediating act of recording itself. As such, it recuperates the technology of the human voice as an oral medium for the performance of poetry. It resists the ephemerality of reading words out loud, rather shifting transience to semantic meaning itself. The fragmentation of words into sounds are thematized in the poems, as synthetized in the title Scree, meaning a mass of small, loose stones or gravel. The slash of Scree/n is embodied in the installation with customized speakers that resemble a screen. Scree/n as an object enacts the archetype of a screen, but redirects the assumption of the visual or moving image towards orality instead. It thus simultaneously asserts the boundaries of image, and by extension verbal signification, and destabilizes those limits through the imaginary of fracturing rocks and poetry as sound. The materiality of the screen doubling as speakers influences sonic formation, manipulating, and ever so slightly splintering, the audible voice through the physical limitations of its edges, surfaces, and enclosures.

While transforming and expanding on the original works, the source material of nine poems was initially produced for a collaboration with artist Kadie Salmon in the form of a sculptural artist’s book, Incipit. Scree. Explicit.

— Klara du Plessis