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In Québec, I had to wrap my tongue around strange words, new sounds, a new language, a different culture, kisses on the cheek. For the first time in my life, I was speaking with an accent, unable to speak as freely as in English. In my early days here, when I was studying at a French university, I often felt like a child: frustrated that I could not express myself articulately, nor completely understand my surroundings.

This disconnection from the language of my surroundings was alienating. But as my French improved, I found that there was an unexpected pleasure and freedom in this disconnection. It was the freedom to utter and think with words which otherwise in English had suffocating emotional social baggage attached to them. Among them, of course was le sexe, alors.

I found my vulgar self in a foreign language, without the self-consciousness or guilt provoked by the force of English words of eroticism ringing in my ears. French became the language to express my desires, no matter how messy, dirty or taboo. (2)

For me, the foreign language became a bawdy language, a conduit for chanelling the visceral cravings of the grotesque body. An internalized grid of languistic and conceptual boundaries has not yet quashed these hankerings en français. No doubt this is reflected more widely in the gleeful prediliction of many learning a new language to utter obscenities with seeming impunity.

According to Mary Russo, the grotesque body is identified with the “lower bodily stratum,” (3) abjected from the canon of classical aesthetics and high culture. In opposition to the classical body, which is closed, static, transcendent, and symmetrical, the grotesque body is “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple and changing.” (4)

“The Québec situation” is a kind of grotesque body in that it is constantly calling into question the immaculate, static borders of the Canadian nation-state. Every four years or so, according to the rhythm of the electoral cycle, Canada and Québec are thrown into an anxious frisson. Will Québec leave? Will it wrench itself from the Rest of Canada? Much confusion exists about the shape and form of the future nation-state of Québec: will newly-formed citizens keep their Canadian passports? Will the current territory of the province of Québec remain untouched, or will the First Nations of Northern Québec refuse to allow their people and their land to be assimilated into the new state, as they have threatened in the past?

Unlike sight, which creates a distance between the observered and the eye of the beholder, sound is a sensation which must physically enter the body to be experienced. Sound waves tickle the hairs of the basilar membrane deep inside our ears. The clean, closed lines of the classical body are subverted by sound. To talk about radio, sound and sexuality is also to reveal the rarely explored potential of the ear as an instrument of pleasure. The ear is highly sexual (a lover once told me that his genitalia were located in the coils of his ear), but rarely is it a sexualized part of the anatomy by visual standards. How many scantily-clad ears have sold Corvettes or cigarattes? The ear is a hidden channel of sensuality, and unlike other bodily orifices, the ear is a hole one cannot close. (5)

Radio broadcasting technology has often been used to assert national borders and nationalist intentions. Canada in particular, is a nation whose emergence is often attributed to the establishement of a national broadcasting system. Although nation-states monopolize and regulate the public airwaves, radio signals often, and sometimes intentionally, leak across national borders, subverting the immaculate media-body of the nation-state. Low power and pirate radio is a away of subverting the mediated national corpus by secreting unregulated signals into the sanctioned mediasphere. Hence in relation to state and corporate interests in radio, low power broadcasting can be seen as a kind of grotesque radio.

For Vêtements Radiophoniques, a tiny radio receiver with small but powerful speakers is sewn into the costumes. During the performance, these corporeal radios will capture experimental sound pieces transmitted via a 1/2 stereo FM radio transmitter. The sound pieces explore the power of desire in foreign language. The sound will appear to be emerging from the body -but not necessarily from mouth or the other traditionally ‘noisy’ orifices. In this way, the radiophonic costume will re-embody a medium that has traditionally been disembodied; it will counter the notion of radio as merely the remote and abstract voice untethered to any physical, material, corporeal reality. With Vêtements Radiophoniques, radio is "repatriated" by the grotesque body.

Through promiscuous mingling of technology and performance, the goal is create a voluptuous form of radio liberated from its “electronic corset”: the rigid corporeal boundaries of the mediated nation-state and normative sexuality.

NOTES

(1) Here ‘promiscuous’ connotes not only licentiousness, but also hybridity.

(2) My mother, an emigre from Communist Eastern Europe, said she could only have found a feminist consciousness in a foreign language.

(3) The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Durham & London: Duke Univ. Press, 1993. p. 8

(4) ibid.

(5) Gregory Whitehead. “Whose There? Notes on the Materiality of Radio” Art & Text 31, Dec/Feb, 1989 p. 12.

Katarina Soukup is a Montreal-based media artist and phonography afficiando. Her past work has explored underground radio broadcasting during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, more recently, numerous collaborations with Inuit artists of the Canadian Arctic. She has presented her media art in Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, and the Czech Republic. She is currently in the midst of a project exploring creative field recording techniques for conjuring the curious and astonishing sounds of the Arctic environment

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