Copeland, a visual artist and lecturer at The University of Texas at Dallas, was in the country on a Fulbright grant, and she met the woman as she assembled a new version of her Soundings exhibition: a sound installation that centers on women, nonbinary and queer individuals.
Artists who record their voices for the project can share anything they want. Then, Copeland and a sound engineer edit the voices into a composite experience.
“She had never screamed in her entire life because she was never permitted to,” Copeland says of the woman she met in India. “I said, ‘Do you want me to scream with you, or would you like to scream by yourself?’ And she's like, ‘I think I got this.’”
At the time, Copeland was recording for Soundings at an arts center in the city of Ahmedabad, so she warned the people in the building that they were about to hear some screaming (“It’s OK,” she told them. “It’s normal.”)
“Afterwards, tears are streaming down her face,” she says of the woman. “And she was like, ‘Thank you so much for allowing me to do that. That was amazing.’”
Now, Soundings is coming to Dallas. From April 26 through May 24, patrons can experience the exhibition at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, 223 W. Jefferson Blvd.; every artist they hear is from Dallas or Fort Worth.“Some people are speaking out against oppression, but for other people, it's about being seen." - artist Colette Copeland
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A Seemingly Simple Concept
Those artists were given a seemingly simple prompt: Share a phrase or series of phrases with deep personal meaning. The request is also simple for guests: Sit back, relax and listen. The cultural center’s gallery will be divided into four listening stations, each set up, as Copeland puts it, “like mini living rooms.” And the sounds themselves will vary just as much as the diverse artists she enlisted for the project.“Some people are speaking out against white patriarchy,” Copeland says. “Some people are speaking out against oppression, but for other people, it's about being seen. It's about feeling gratitude.”
One of the featured voices is Erica Felicella, a performance artist who, for a 2020 piece, lay on a bed of rocks for more than 10 hours. People were invited to watch her and place rocks on her body as a way of “letting go.”
“I kind of lost the feeling in my body, which is to be expected,” she says. “I have some crazy ideas, and even I wonder why I'm doing it sometimes. When I'm sitting in pain, it's like, ‘Why did you think of this? I mean, can you just think of one where you just have to eat pancakes?’ But it doesn't work that way.”
Her contribution to the new version of Soundings is starkly different — no rocks are involved — but it holds significant personal meaning for the artist, who seized the opportunity to speak about love and the LGBTQ community. In her recording, her voice falls to a whisper and then rises to a boom as Felicella says, among other things, “My gender does not belong to you.”
The volume and the different characters her voice takes on surprised Felicella.
“I didn't know that I sounded like an evangelical preacher regarding these topics until I got in front of that mic,” she says, laughing. She’s not necessarily trying to make an overt political stance.
“It's more about, ‘OK, let's take a little lightened perspective and pay attention to our world.’ And this happens to be a part of the world. That means a lot to me because it's my rights. It's my rights, and I'm tired of it being a hot-button issue.”
The other artists involved also told the Observer how much their Soundings contributions mean to them.
For instance, there’s Shahrzad Hamzeh, a multi-talented artist from Iran whose crafts include dance and poetry. Hamzeh is a survivor of rape, and she says it took her a while to be comfortable speaking or writing about it. Now, she’s starting to share her experience through poetry, including one of the poems she reads in Soundings.
“For that to be played over and over again for people to listen to is kind of liberating,” she says, “Because nobody wants to hear about rape. Because everybody likes to pretend that society is fine.”
She also likes how the exhibition provides a novel way to “open conversations” and spur reflection with people from varied walks of life. Shortly after its appearance in Oak Cliff, Soundings will head to Texas Tech University. Other project iterations have also appeared in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Arkansas and India, where Copeland was asked to come in for an "interview" by the county’s Foreigners Registration Office. The interview was a soft interrogation — a series of questions about every aspect of her work, research, teaching methods and her ultimate motives for being in the country.
She was released without incident, but the ordeal was terrifying. Based on the questions they asked, Copeland thinks the police worried she was involved in subversive activities or perhaps teaching them. This is why she was cautious about promoting her work in the country. For fear of reprisal, she didn’t use social media to post anything that criticized the government or explicitly addressed gender violence and oppression.
Even still, Copeland is grateful for the experience. A Fulbright is an honor, and it helped her pursue two of her overarching goals: bring her work to new places and collaborate with world-class talent.
But she wants to keep that talent safe.
Copeland allows her Soundings collaborators to add their photos to her website (where the recordings are kept in an archive) or keep their appearance private.
“You do not have to use your bio,” she says. “You can make something up. It could be completely fictional. That part can be left blank. I give them full control on what degree of transparency they want to have once their voice is out there.”
A Commitment to Collaboration
This commitment to her collaborators’ comfort is just one reason people feel drawn to work with her. All of the artists interviewed for this story said they were intrigued by the opportunity to participate in an audio installation, but they also wanted to work with Copeland.“I was really drawn to her collaborative, community-based approach,” says Carmen Menza, an interdisciplinary artist featured in the installation. “I really enjoy being part of a larger collaborative effort or work where I can join with other individuals and learn from them and amplify their voices.”
Menza’s recording focuses on bodily autonomy and the fact that “oppression veiled as religion is still oppression.” She was inspired by the 2022 death of Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who was beaten and killed by police for not wearing a hijab, as well as the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“The Dobbs decision had a direct effect on me taking a turn in my artwork to be more political,” she says. “Because we've just been thrust back decades.”
Copeland was also inspired by the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade. The first Soundings show debuted shortly after that decision.
“The project is about amplifying voices that have historically been silenced: female, nonbinary and queer voices,” Copeland says. “And so, for me, it's a social practice. I think of it as very much a collaborative community project, where I am serving as a witness and a facilitator to create a safe space for people to find their authentic voice.”
“And so that,” she adds, “can be anything.”
