MISOPHONIA.
(installation, performance and sound)
Misphonia explores performativity; social scripting/masking, the psyche, the central nervous system and the erotic (as power/life source), through lived experience of patriarchy, trauma and (inevitably) late diagnosed neurodiversity. [(Currently), most AFAB people aren’t diagnosed until their 20s-40s due to patriarchal constructs within and outside of the medical system, and the connection between worsening of symptoms and hormonal fluctuations that occur with age.]
The foundation of this work stemmed from Innocent’s desire to understand difficulties faced when they first stopped heavily masking/dissociating from stimuli. This process fostered a return to states of embodiment; specifically, an understanding of the body as a site where various forms of conscious and unconsciously accumulated knowledge intersect, and our where our sensory boundaries and language emerge. Following this, a growing obsession with the sonic became a processual method of understanding their neurodivergence through their own complex relationship with sound; the inability to prioritise sounds or filter out ‘unimportant’ sounds is often intensely experienced, either as destabilising or euphoric.
Experimentation with conventional instruments and technologies enabled an understanding of sonic limits via their materiality and embodied aspects; developing into a Neuro Queering of sound and sound making objects in order to challenge the deeply entrenched gendered hierarchies concerning notions of musical ontology and agency. This birthed an agential sculpture, collagic of (but not limited to) traditional instruments, to create sonic aesthetics beyond the subjectivities materially embedded in the presence of conventional sound objects.
The creation of (new) sonic landscapes allows an ‘unmasked’ experience of being in the world, using the sculptural and spatial, sound and the corporeal as interconnected sites of both knowledge and experience. This process adopted new materialist and posthuman feminist frameworks which destabilise the body as central and rather consider the body as always in flux with its environment, and in communication with external stimuli. This culminates in the performance itself as an experience of a complex emotional landscape, where both conventional and unconventional instrumentation interact in a reciprocal relationship with elements of the performer’s own corporeal and psychological positioning, and resonance and co-regulation amongst viewers.
Angelina Innocent acknowledges the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands she lives, works and draws inspiration from. She pays deep respect to their Elders past and present, and acknowledges their continuing connection to the land.
Angelina.innocent.leah@gmail.com
instagram.com/angelina._.innocent
