M HKA Ensembles

Video, 270 x 152 x 85 cm.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist, Matt's Gallery, London, and AKINCI, Amsterdam.

Imogen Stidworthy investigates the physical and social impact of the spoken word and the thresholds of communication. Her installation Sacha reflects on the politics of listening, elucidating ways in which power operates within visual and sonic regimes. Combining different components that form an audio and visual environment, Sacha portrays on one screen wiretap analyst Sacha van Loo, who works for the Antwerp police analysing voice recordings made during the surveillance of suspects. Having been blind since birth, he understands space through acoustics and his highly-developed echolocation skills, which, with his fluency in numerous languages and dialects, also help him to analyse speech and the unspoken intentions and meanings in dialogue. In the video, van Loo is seen analysing a voice recording –  the recording is in fact the voice of the artist reading a passage from Aleksandr Solzhenitsin’s novel In the First Circle (1968) in the original Russian. Van Loo struggles to understand the words due to her imprecise pronunciation. In this story, a group of imprisoned Soviet scientists and linguists are commanded by Stalin to develop a voice scrambler to protect Stalin’s personal telephone line, and a voice-printing machine for enabling the KGB to identify people through wiretap recordings of their voices – one technology for destroying language and the other for capturing it.

In a second video, the eye is drawn through the virtual space of a 3D laser-scan of city streets. This most precise mapping of surfaces involves no optical technology and works through a principle that is closer to how we hear than to how we see. In relation to the reality of Van Loo’s listening and blindness, this technological image suggests different paradigms for how we conceive of and form images.