Sophie Seita will be in residence at Studio Voltaire from February to April 2025, culminating in public events and a collaborative publication.
London-based artist and researcher Sophie Seita works with language as a sensuous, sculptural and sonic material. Translating and moulding language, they produce live performances, publications, objects, scores, sound pieces, drawings and textiles.
During her residency, Seita will research Studio Voltaire’s archive of performance commissions to develop her ongoing project, Touching Language, which experiments with forms of writing ‘for, about, or as’ performance.
Seita uses methods like sensory ethnography, archival work and practice-based research to draw from their personal experiences with queer collaborations across generations and countries. They also incorporate somatic practices, which focus on connecting with bodily sensations.
There's an emphatic focus on form in their work and the project experiments with the forms a performance, text, workshop or lecture could take, exploring non-linear and unpredictable approaches. For Seita, performance offers insights into the politics of attention, and a way to examine how we pay attention to bodies, objects, images and the sounds in and around us. By using somatic practices, they delve deeper into how language can be physical and how it can create or imagine sensory experiences.
Touching Language explores these ideas practically by working with various surfaces and materials as sites for reading.
