Johanna Linsley and Rebecca Collins began working together in 2014, with the support of the Live Art Development Agency, Sound & Music and Arts Bournemouth in a workshop for performance makers exploring eavesdropping. Building on the success of this initial collaboration, Collins and Linsley continued to develop the project under the title Stolen Voices. The project has taken the form of participatory workshops, new music composition, experimental performance, community gig nights, radio broadcasts and an interactive installation we dubbed the Eavesdropbox, as well as an artist book project currently in progress which we call a sonic detective novel.
Johanna Linsley is an artist, writer and researcher working on sonic fiction, queer domesticities and the politics of encounter and assembly. She is a founder of the London-based performance collective I’m With You and a founding partner of UnionDocs, a centre for documentary arts in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been seen at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Barbican, and the Wellcome Collection among many other spaces nationally and internationally. www.jhlinsley.com
Rebecca Collins is an artist researcher working between contemporary performance and sound studies. Her practice, grounded in specific sites or communities, investigates the relationships between social, political and cultural phenomena. She is interested in how critical, fictional and performative interventions might cultivate attention towards our contemporary condition indicating potential levers for change. She is co-organiser of Women In Sound/Women On Sound (WISWOS), a research network which profiles and supports women working in sound and music technology. She is an associate artist at Aberystwyth Arts Centre and with Newcastle-based theatre makers Cap-a-Pie. She is a member of TaPRA and Artea, an interdisciplinary research group based in Spain.Rebecca is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. www.rebeccalouisecollins.com
Programme Note – Stolen Voices
Stolen Voices is an ongoing inquiry by Johanna Linsley and Rebecca Collins, with rotating collaborators inspired by eavesdropping. Stolen Voices is a performance that is listening in on the East Coast of the UK. Artists and eavesdroppers Johanna Linsley and Rebecca Collins, along with a wide-ranging group of local agents with their ears on the ground, offer the results of an investigation into the acoustic textures of the coast, and invite you to join the community of listeners. Part experimental theatre, part sonic detective novel, Stolen Voices is a piece for anyone who has ever contemplated the pleasures and perils of a stranger’s voice.