Salomé Voegelin: Silenced Noise

This presentation considers noise in relation to intelligibility and inclusion. It considers it as sound, quiet or loud, which does not fit into a semantic, musical, artistic or cultural and political regime; and which thereby remains unrecognisable, unintelligible and without conventional value. Such noise approaches silence through its own muted voice and brings to discussion the very frames of legitimation and intelligibility that determine quality, meaning, sense and nonsense. Noise thus becomes an issue of representation and the way we look at things. How we approach them and what we expect. This is an issue of proximity and orientation. To loosely refer to Sara Ahmed on this point: the way our ears turn make some things noise and others a sound, and conversely our orientation silences what looks an/other way. From here my contribution attempts to practice a deliberate embracing of noise as a path towards inclusivity and as a critique of judgment, providing a feminist and decolonial stance: to ent