Sound Fisherwoman – Laura Mello

Sound Fisherwoman for voice, loudspeaker-costume, stereo or 4-channel audio, 1 channel video, pandeiro.

As Sound Fisherwoman, Laura Mello turns the ear toward survival. The artist’s descent from families implicated in colonial practices, combined with her indigenous ancestry, renders her identity a vessel containing contradictory histories in their entirety. As Sound Fisherwoman, listening becomes the method for attending to this density—making audible the layers of inheritance that cannot be separated, only heard together, as a game of survival in which silence itself becomes complicity.

Sound Fisherwoman came into existence after the pandemic – when poems and songs arose – and integrates field recordings from outdoors soundscapes, and media clipping from indoor passive media consumption (TV & Radio). The materials have been mostly collected in Vienna, as well as in Istanbul, during an artistic residency at the Tarabya Cultural Academy.

The visual ideas for the loudspeaker-costume have been developed since 2019, when I was granted the Work Scholarship from the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe. Since then, the performer persona wears the newest designed version of it, developed in collaboration with Lisa Simpson and Albert Amerioun.

This edition of Composing for Many Media Including Me has been supported by the GEMA – Neustart Kultur Stipendium and the Tarabya Culture Academy Istanbul.