Karen Werner's Covenant of the Tongue explores place and memory through utterance as an avowal of the continuing presence of her family history, expressed as consistent and multi-generational in spite of the trauma which the Holocaust inflicted upon her ancestors and upon subsequent generations of survivors. Werner seeks to avoid building a narrative of victimization in favor of addressing the material and poetic experiences of presence and absence in place, particularly in her mother's family house in the city of Vienna from the which the family were exiled.

Sound and radio works more generally are concerned with the paradox of presence and absence that characterize the circumstances of such media: voices emerge from technological bodies into spaces that are distant from one another; listeners and speakers must experience and parse distances in order to be in relationship. In the early days of radio transmission and audio recording media, spiritualist beliefs proliferated alongside their development and some people believed that these emerging communications media might enable special congress with spirits or ghosts of the dearly departed, much as a séance was meant to engage the ghosts of a haunted house. The German word for uncanny is “unheimlich”, the negation of “heimlich”, which in turn is a word containing both reference to home and to secrecy. “Unheimlich” therefore suggests that which is neither homely nor secret, rendering the uncanny as both uncomfortable and potentially revelatory. These shades of meaning seem very apt when considering Werner's intentions for this piece: she explores the building where her family lived in Vienna before being displaced and disappeared under Nazism, and by returning to this site she encounters an uncomfortable intersection of past and present in a house which is no longer home, and where acts of persecution are obscured but not secret. She begins with the question, what is a ghost?  And by extension, how are we to listen in this space of discomfort, and what may be revealed?

The space of the entrée, in an apartment building, on a street corner, in a neighborhood, becomes a resonant setting for self-reflexive sonic experiments. Speech acts animate the space and allow the listener to experience the material body of memory in the form of the descendent, sounding back to ancestors and forward into the attention of the present. Werner's re-worlding of her family's former home in Vienna centers around her spoken utterances of letters and words from the Kabbalistic text Sefer Yetzirah, applying the performative aesthetics from sound poetry collaged with field recordings,  brief samples from interviews, and a thick, nearly continuous backdrop of static. Here I'm missing the inclusion of the empty room tone of this same space before or after Werner inhabits it with her voice —even if sounds of the everyday in the space are entirely banal and sometimes so minimal to be almost silent—as this contrast would allow listeners to more precisely feel the change in sonic state which Werner's performativity enables.

Werner is committed to thinking ethically through sound; therefore, in addition to the tradition of the divine speaker as world-maker, she makes audible the complicity of the listener in world-making. The first step of empathic communication is the capacity for listening by both witnesses and by the one who is sounding. Werner's listening is attentive to inter-generational site-specificity in relationship to ancestors, actions, history, memory, and place; her composition brings listeners gradually into acquaintance with her process of listening, testing, tasting, uttering, and to the affirmation of presence which her voice enables, re-materializing in the space.

Reviewer Bio:

Anna Friz is a Canadian sound and radio artist and media studies scholar. Her works for performance, installation and broadcast focus on media ecologies and signal space, land and infrastructure, time perception, and speculative fictions. Recent presentations of her solo and collaborative performances and installations include Ars Electronica Big Concert Night (Linz, Austria), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Soundwave Biennial ((8)) (San Francisco), the New York Times Magazine Voyages: Listen to the World edition, XIV Festival Ecuatoriano de Música Contemporánea (Quito, Ecuador), Radiophrenia (Glasgow, Scotland), SITE Gallery and Desert Unit for Speculative Territories, University of Houston, Texas.  Her radio works have been heard around the world and commissioned by national public radio in Australia, Austria, Canada, Danmark, Finland, Germany, Mexico and Spain. Anna is Assistant Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department of University of California, Santa Cruz.