In Empathy Apparatus Two: A System For Amplifying The Echo, I use volume to act in the face of incomprehensibility.

The Empathy Apparatus in this work is a crocheted collar made of speaker wire, a cassette recorder and a speaker system. I had started expecting the collar to have some material effect on the sound but instead found that wearing it had more of an effect on me. The final collar physically holds my posture and emphasises my breathing, changing the way I speak. By repeating the excerpt of my grandmother’s speech, I aimed to fill space with my own voice and the words of my grandmother. Like the writing of the Memorising Dress, this act lets me arrest the echo, staying with the clear facts of this story and exercising my memorising publicly.

To complete this work, I took a new collar to Mugga Quarry, an abandoned quarry in Mugga Mugga Nature Reserve, ACT. I chose Mugga Quarry to perform this work because it is a liminal space. The quarry is a deep scar in the nature reserve, it is defined by a violent extraction act, but is undergoing the process of being refilled and rehabilitated. By being an environment that is simultaneously neither built nor wild, the quarry mimics my own state of being restricted and liberated in the performances. In that highly resonant space, I set up large speakers and spoke my grandmother’s words into a small tape dictation machine. I then played the recording at maximum volume, through the dictation machine, the collar, and the speaker system.

The Speaker Collar