Socioplastics 11820 The Testimony Changes Hands
A statement can be quoted accurately and still change when a curator, planner or institution selects its audience and purpose. VoiceDelegation follows the transfer of speaking authority through recording, editing, exhibition and decision. A resident may describe a square as unsafe because lighting fails in winter. An artwork may present the sentence as evidence of neighbourhood fear; a municipal report may later cite it to justify surveillance. Each passage alters the practical meaning of the testimony. Miwon Kwon’s work on site-specific art and location examines how place, authorship and public address interact. Tania Bruguera’s practice develops forms of socially engaged art and public participation. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak analyses representation and the conditions under which voices become legible to power. Their work helps trace who selects a statement, who interprets it and who can shape the action taken in its name. A testimony protocol could record the speaker’s original purpose, consent conditions, edits, intended audience and subsequent uses. Contributors could review quotations and request corrections as material moves between an interview, exhibition, report or policy process. Researchers would preserve the context of each transfer and document how an institution used the statement. This creates an accountable chain from speech to representation and from representation to action. VoiceDelegation makes the circulation of testimony available for public examination. It supports collaboration by giving contributors a continuing role in how their words are framed and used. The marker asks how authority moves with a statement and what procedures allow its originators to remain involved.
REFERENCES
Bruguera, T. (2011–) Arte Útil. Asociación de Arte Útil, project documentation.
Kwon, M. (2002) One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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