Collectable

‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’

María Ruido and the human voice

In one of her first performances, which took place in A Coruña in June 1997, María Ruido focused on the violence of language, one of the most unremarked yet powerful forms of dominance. The Human Voice takes as its starting point an excerpt from El origen de la mujer sujeto (The Origin of the Female Subject, 1996), a book by Miguel Cereceda in which this theoretician and art critic addresses the historic moment when women began to assert themselves as subjects.

Ruido overlaps two voices: the text reproduced in a radio-cassette and a reading of it by herself. Reappropriating the discourse through her body, and as the reading progresses, she covers her mouth with adhesive tape. Commenting on this action, in 2004 Ruido wrote in a text titled El silencio material (The Material Silence): «Saying that women speak/write publicly doesn’t mean that they do it with their own words. In many cases, they simply imitate strategies and prosodies in order to achieve their share in the exercise of power. […] A critical, discursive practice involves exposing the norms of the linguistic framework, which are those of the social game. Because as the Afro-American poet Audre Lorde said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.»

WORKS IN THE COLLECTION BY MARÍA RUIDO

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