RE:SOUND 2019

FREEDOM HIGHWAY is a transmission art work initially created from 2001-2004, which the artist is currently revisiting in the contemporary political and social climate. In the lead-up to the invation of Iraq (2002-2003), I made numerous road trips across the United States during which I recorded radio programming in the format known as talk radio. Talk radio in the US is heavily skewed towards the right wing; dominated by ultra- conservatives politically and evangelical Christians religiously. Since the 1990’s, the culture of talk radio has been at the vanguard of legitimizing and mainstreaming the ideological beliefs and policy priorities that now hold sway in the current US administration. In the present political moment, this normalization of vehement nativism and xenophobia seems increasingly overwhelming. This is why for the past two years I have been revisiting the work, which I first performed extensively in the US, Canada and Europe from 2004-2008. In North America, the roots of xenophobia and nativism run very deep. The widespread glorification of these destructive tendencies which we are witnessing today are not without precedent. Understanding the current episode in American public discourse and media requires a renewed examination of the politics of the spoken word. FREEDOM HIGHWAY is an audio composition constructed around a multi-voiced spoken narrative, composited from hundreds of speakers recorded in about twenty American states: right-wing call-in hosts, radio preachers, shock jocks and sports commentators as well as their guests and callers. Radio interference and static are also used extensively throughout the piece to create additional spaces besides the ones (radio studio and telephone) inherent in the programming itself. The resulting audio footage is then assembled into an audio performance and a gallery installation, a deeply troubling “audio self-portrait” of America as rendered by the nation’s political and religious radio broadcasters, and as overheard or intercepted by a listener who is not the intended audience of these broadcasts. FREEDOM HIGHWAY has been performed, broadcast, and exhibited in gallery installation form regularly since 2004. It has been heard in the US, Canada, and Europe.

In this 20 minute spoken record, Barkun recite all the medications, medical appointments and intimate measurements taken day-to-day during my fifth and final cycle of in vitro fertilization, which lasted 56 days. This diary uses voice to activate memory, as reading the list becomes a vehicle of translation for my multilayered experience. At times Barkun trip or stutter over scientific names of medications; these linguistic difficulties reflect my attempts to surmount all the foreign substances injected and ingested during the protocol. My body becomes increasingly medicalized for procreative means and in the end is confirmed as a dysfunctional space; the artwork ends with the thud of the final result: “zero embryos”. Her reproductive and medical failure is measured, calculated, and put on display. This speaking of her corporeal failure is a conscious act of resistance against the taboo of infertility, the veneration of science, and the normative voices of Western society.