While the Ladyz in Noyz (LIN) virtual feminist collective’s roots are embedded and made possible by online technologies, at its heart, networking is enhanced and made possible by raw and vulnerable human connections. While abstraction is useful in challenging mainstream sensibilities, LIN sound artists and musicians participate in a textual exercise that evades the obscurity afforded by the formal elements of their work. More explicitly, invited LIN participants will be asked to rely on exercises in verbal articulation to approximate the unease and ambiguity made apparent by global quarantines. The participants will be asked to write and create on the spot responses to various questions on their current lived experience. This writing then becomes source material for several exercises through themes of assonance (emotion/vulnerability), dissonance (ambivalence/contrariness), and consonance (meaning/structure.) Participation and performance are created in live time to create a document of distance and intimacy in current conditions of perceived and enforced isolation.
Born in Baltimore, USA, artist/activist/academic Marlo De Lara received a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her artistic practice works within the realms of sound performance, visual distraction, and film. Working under the moniker ‘marlo eggplant’, her sound art is a production of textural compositions which develop from microscopic tone landscapes into dense and expansive states of noise and drone. Works aim to blur the definitions of (un)intentional sound and music. De Lara’s research addresses subjects relating to feminism, representation of marginalized populations, and creative work as political action. As curator and organizer of the Ladyz in Noyz international compilation series/collective, an ongoing project from 2008 to the present, she continues to promote emerging artists and musicians who are women.