Personal Accounts, 2024- , multi-cycle video & sound installation, installation views, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, La Biennale di Venezia (2024), photos by Luc Meneghel
Personal Accounts
2024-
Personal Accounts is a transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair.
As an ongoing series of video and sound cycles (first initiated in 2014), Personal Accounts addresses the global normativity of patriarchal violence and the multiplicity of ways in which black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary and trans individuals survive – cultivating para conditions in which to thrive.
In cycles produced in cities across the world, women and gender-diverse collaborators share their personal accounts of survival and repair. At times they revisit traumatic experiences of physical, sexual, emotional and/or material harm. In other instances they unpack the more incremental, everyday structures, norms, expectations and encounters that uphold patriarchy and recycle the precarity of feminine and non-gender-normative lives. But these are not accounts of violence only. Rather, they trace and celebrate the creative, often fugitive ways in which survivors assert life and possibility within and despite conditions of negation.
In a decision taken by the artist, with the prior consent of her collaborators, the spoken words of each account are withheld. What remains is a paralinguistic sonic stream of in-between moments: breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter – inducing the beside, nearby, adjacent and beyond of what is said, not said, or if said, not heard. Foregoing lexicality, this is a gesture of care and recognition, disarming the preconditions of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ that so regularly undermine the testimonies (and so experiences) of survivors. Asserted instead is the shared breath and presence of the collaborators themselves.
As the different cycles collectively sound, participants are drawn into a para space of sonic entanglement, of personal accounts that exceed the voice/voiceless dichotomy of political representation. This calls for a different kind of relation, a politics of love and avowal that doesn’t disregard intersectional difference, contextual specificities, or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.
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Acknowledgements:
Personal Accounts (2024- ) is a multi-cycle, transnational video and sound installation project produced by Gabrielle Goliath, with support from: Galleria Raffaella Cortese - Milan, Albisola; Goodman Gallery - Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, New York; Kamel Lazaar Foundation; OsloMet University, Department of Journalism; and Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh.
Special thanks to the Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates; Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre; Telefono Donna, Como; Make Perceive, Dublin; and Melissa Parry.
Preview videos of select cycles are available on request for research purposes.
Visit www.personal-accounts.art
Click here for more information on the 2014 iteration