For me, “hearing” has been linked with water for a very long time.
Although I was born hearing, I lost a good bit of my hearing at six. Soon after I was outfitted with a box hearing aid that hung in a pouch clipped to my shirt, with a long cord that would up the side of my neck, to the earmold that stuck out from my right ear.
Suddenly, sound became mysterious: an experience that appeared and disappeared unevenly, a perpetual series of sonic mirages. I am almost always “at sea” in the sound field.
A scene in The Miracle Worker, a movie about Helen Keller (blind and Deaf) and her life, reveals how Helen, as a child, finally understood that, as the water spewed from the pump over her hands, that Anne Sullivan was spelling “w-a-t-e-r” across her palm.
In this one moment, “hearing” becomes “transmuted:” it is translated through touch.
And then through the power of water, it acts an instantiation of the connective tissue of our livingness, how we communicate, how we know. Water is crucial to how we touch—see—hear the world.
Art moves us like water. It acts as an assistive technology in the re-fabrication of the world, allowing us to hear what we cannot necessarily hear, but can touch, feel, and sense.
Sound Bodies I. October 2019-March 2020.
Credits: Image from Dance Film, Leo Leung
Sound Bodies I. October 2019-March 2020.
Credits: Drawing: Kevin Lin. Concept: Kanta Kochhar.
Sound Bodies I. October 2019-March 2020.
