Salomé Voegelin Interview

Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher, and practitioner, who works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet in the contemporary crises of climate and public health, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric demands can engender different and plural knowledge possibilities. She is a professor of sound at the London College of Communication, UAL.

How did you get to where you are today, professionally?

To narrate my work and research path, I have to go back quite a bit to understand and articulate where what I am hoping for still came from. I do not want to bore anybody with too much detail but feel it makes sense to spend a brief moment on my early education, as this sets up my idiosyncratic and difficult relationship to education and knowledge, which is at the centre of my work now.

I want to advocate for a sonic and thus a plural and embodied education at every level, but particularly in primary school. I hated primary school, I did not fit in, got bad marks and had to repeat a class. Now in hindsight I know this is not because I was stupid but because primary education at least in 70s Switzerland, did not make space for children but moulded them. There is no room for plurality and possibility, and I failed, not at being enthusiastic and open to learning, but at being receptive to this educational norm. For example, I did not understand why girls had two hours more class every week than boys, just to learn needle work, so I just did not go. What did not make sense I could not engage in. Embodiment means to take your body with you not only into the material to be learnt but into the sense and structure of things.