CCA Research Associate Marie-Andrée Pellerin at Close(d) Future

CCA'S 2022 Research Associate Marie-Andrée Pellerin performed at Kunstraum Lakeside part of the Carinthian cultural program "Close(d) Future".

Speculative Keys brings together a video work and a sound performance as two iterations of a long-term project about the concept of language fluidity in science fiction literature.

With the title, Marie-Andrée Pellerin refers, on the one hand, to science fiction literature that speculatively attempts to generate new social relationships and practice communication acts with radically different living beings, while on the other, to the instrument of the performance, a computer keyboard and its misappropriated and repurposed keys. The artist’s body of research consists of a collection of science fiction stories, which describe various ways of dealing with “linguistic deficits” and alternative ways of conversing with others. Some texts propose abandoning language as we know it in favor of new forms of communication, ranging from an advanced feminist language to telepathy and even chemically embodied signals. Pellerin selects segments from these science fiction stories, some of which were commissioned to science fiction authors for this specific project (Élisabeth Vonarburg, Monika Rinck), and translates them into new narratives and abstract soundscapes. Additionally, coined words from a speculative lexicon developed in the Moroccan desert with her collaborators from the Ansible Institute aim to actualize a practice of language fluidity.

Image: Sound performance, Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt, Austria,
June 2022. Photo: Stefan Reichmann