Gabrielle Goliath

Personal Accounts

multi-cycle video & sound installation
2024-

Personal Accounts (2024 ) is a transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair.

As an ongoing series, Personal Accou­­nts addresses the global normativity of patriarchal violence and the many ways black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary and trans individuals survive – cultivating 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 material harm. In other instances they unpack the more incremental, everyday structures, norms, expectations and encounters that 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 together with the collaborators, the spoken words of each account are withheld. What remains is a sonic stream of in-between moments: breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter – invoking 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 experiences of survivors.

As the cycles collectively sound, participants are drawn into a space of sonic entanglement, of personal accounts that exceed the voice/voiceless dichotomy of political representation. Asserted here is a different kind of relation – a politics of love and avowal that does not disregard intersectional difference or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks rather for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.