Hearing Voices

Photography by Denise Hawrysio

Hearing Voices is a body of work based on highly endangered ‘click languages’ spoken by indigenous Khoi and San peoples in the Kalahari Desert. The main output of this long-term project — the focus of my PhD research — is an 8-channel photographic sound installation which has shown at the Botswana National Museum, the Art Gallery of Namibia, and at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS in London. It also includes an award-winning half-hour composed documentary for BBC Radio 3, described by John Drever in Resonance Magazine as “a capricious sound world where aural objects shift and surprise”.

Hearing Voices: Speakers/Languages is an interactive app originally designed to accompany the installation. It contains sound recordings, photographs, interviews, maps and information about the languages and about the issues around language endangerment. Updated in 2014 to accompany Volume 12 of the journal Language Documentation and Description, the app includes a foreword by David Toop and recordings of two click-language choirs. The app has been used by the Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa to assist in the struggle for rights and recognition of their languages and cultures.

An article about my work with field recordings was published in Sonic Geography Imagined and Remembered. My presentation at ‘Fieldworks: dialogues between art and anthropology’, at Tate Modern in London, led to a chapter in Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice, edited by Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright. The article ‘When is a Click not a Glitch?’ was commissioned for the book Sound Art, edited by Anna Colin and Tobi Maier. Language Ecology and Photographic Sound in the McWorld was published in the journal Organised Sound.

“Through his research and practice in Botswana, recording click language speech by individuals who collaborate as performers at the beginning of a process, Wynne constructs an experience that flickers on the boundaries between speech and sound, and the various levels of meaning that can be derived from human communications. Simultaneously, the work alerts the perceiver to the beauty of language and its potential as a plastic medium, to specifics and generalities, to political and economic realities, and to the troubled, yet fruitful connections that can be nurtured in spite of an intimidating geographical, linguistic, cultural, and technological divide.” David Toop, Foreword to Hearing Voices

“Academic and sound artist John Wynne provides an excellent example of a creative practice of ‘responsible engagement with other cultures’ in his sound-animated photographs of speakers of endangered languages Hearing Voices. Here the artist avoids a facile politics of alterity — what art critic Hal Foster denounced as over-identification turning into appropriation of the other — by using a number of devices that ‘frame the framer’. This reveals the asymmetries and the fraught politics at work in representation and, crucially, provides some contextualization, a feature usually absent in relational art.” Chiara de Cesari, Journal of Museum Ethnography