The Voice Note

About the show:

Have you ever listened to something for so long that you start hearing it in complete silence?

In Tehran being emptied by war, a woman returns to the music school where she has spent two years recording women learning to sing. Before leaving the city, she has one task: leave a hard drive in the school safe.

Through storytelling and live sound, projected moving images and archival material, The Voice Note grows from artistic research into altered forms of presence and return, especially within geographies and political conditions where the “after” of one rupture is often already the “before” of the next. Personal, familial and imagined voices move through the work, appearing in altered forms across sound, writing, breath, archive or object. What does the void around a voice that was there only seconds ago sound like? How does a voice try to come back after being suppressed, erased, lost or forgotten?

Bios:

Bahar Ara [she/her] is an Iranian writer, filmmaker and artistic researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice moves between moving image and writing, often working with sound, personal footage, archives and found texts. Shaped by Persian traditions of nested storytelling, especially Rumi’s Masnavi, she develops works in which one image or voice can open into another without fully leaving the first behind. She did her Master of Arts in Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy.

Christian Johannes [he/him] is an Amsterdam-based Dutch/Surinamese {de}composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist. He mainly works in electro-acoustic formats and is deeply involved with folk, glitch and environmental sound, synthesising these aesthetics in his work. In his recently released debut album glitch_folk:a.manifesto:, Johannes reworks 8 death-related folk tunes, decomposing and breaking them down using digital means, with the aim of learning to let go of things that you love.

Credits:

Bahar Ara – writer, director and performer
Christian Johannes – live sound performer and sound designer
Developed within the Master of Film: Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy