Kudos acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation. They are the traditional custodians of the land Kudos operates on. We create, design, share, and exchange our work and knowledge on this important meeting place. We pay our respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations people who engage with Kudos. This is and always will be Aboriginal land.
Kudos Digital
Soomin Jeong
Engange in an interactive experience via the link below. Soomin is collecting the texture of voices as if they’re the surface of ripples. Once you contribute your voice via this website, you can enter the digital space of this project.
After I decided to use English more often than Korean, my first language, I have been getting familiar with silence. I often swallow my words. Sometimes it makes me simple and at the same time complex and destabilised. That sense makes me think clearly about who I am and what message only I can bring. The very subtle and minor feelings from others’ faces… that made me look back a few years ago when I built a small exhibition with other artists about misunderstood mermaids. At that moment, honestly, I didn’t feel I was a mermaid, but I needed to listen to the mermaids' narrative more carefully. However, now I have become the mermaid between the borders of rippling waters. I am inviting everyone to experience this fantastic umwelt.¹
Interrupted–
Living in this world means we never escape the constant interruption. In this circulation of intervention, we tend to listen and hear sounds a little bit more clearly than what we don’t know or what we decide not to know on our end. What has made you be bothered? Haven’t you thought one day you could bring the wind of bothering? Are you going to be the one who keeps striving to understand and find new beauty from the whole chaotic interruptions, or the one who just turns off and pulls yourself away from the interruptions? The voice you recorded to see this work — is it going to be the interrupted or interrupting one when it mixes with other voices, like this work?
Surfaces–
Let’s imagine the surface of the water and its ripples absorbing all the unique sunlight, wind, and air. There is never the same surface of the water on any single day. Likewise, our voices are represented by the wave of water. The sea might absorb human voices with the air as well. Maybe that can be the reason people mechanically choose the way to express our voice into the soundwave bar. The existence of mermaids has been the high and discomforting pitch on the soundwave bar. Unexpectedly, the existence appears on the surface. It seems so similar to the dominant normative humans but distinctively different. High pitch is always marked as red or yellow to give warnings because it evokes a discomforting sonic experience for the listener. Across the West to the East, penetrating all eras, mermaids have always taken the role of representing the odds without their own voice, only with their speechlessness from the unknown underwater world humans have never tried to understand at all.
Voices–
The poem shed light on the mermaids’ voice. What we all forget too easily is that we can be the mermaid at any time, and most of us don’t know how to make our voice under the water. However, we can’t help but confront the moment when we constantly and slightly slip and fall when we are trying to talk about our genuine selves to others. We feel the fear that the big and major waves might crash over our tiny ripple of voice. That fear makes you stop thinking about your own voice. Once you start thinking about what your voice is or whether your voice is strong or audible, more noise and interventions must be made. When we become speechless because we are engulfed by the big voice of waves and are deleted as the peculiar high pitch, we are unconsciously deprived of the chance to find our voice no matter how it sounds.
This is an invitation from underwater to give the chance to feel the noise, intervene, be brave to find your cherished voice, and willingly be the high pitch on the soundwave. Can the mermaid speak? Don’t be the myth-maker, be part of the myth.
Thank Si-Yeon Kim, Yoomin Jeong, and Nell Trotter for being the first voice of All I Have Is a Voice
1. All I Have is a Voice is a moving image work inspired by discussions from the 2022 independent group exhibition Hotel Umwelt, which explored the origins and misconceptions surrounding mermaid myths across Eastern and Western cultures.
The title references a line from Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, whose ecofeminist literature often highlights the voice as the most powerful weapon of those marginalised by dominant narratives.
Through this work, I aim to raise questions about which voices are forgotten — socially, historically, or even personally — and how they are borrowed, distorted, or silenced over time.
Umwelt is a German term for the unique sensory world.