mothertongues is Kim Ye & Meital Yaniv

Vocal Transplantation is a performance, a therapeutic exercise, and an experiment in trust. Taking the bureaucracies in which we circulate as our starting point, we point to the limits these systems impose upon our expressions of personhood. As a strategy to combat a structure that draws its power from the ability to categorize, we blur our identities by wearing opaque black bodysuits that shift our specific identities into generic silhouettes. In this state, we voice words that we cannot put on the record. Filtering our expression through the surrogate body, we bypass immigration and litigation surveillance. Our tentacles connect us, and our glasses illuminate to the rhythm of one's own words spoken by the host’s voice. Like an incubator of secrets, we express our unmonitored and unsupervised truth.

Through collaboration, mothertongues creates a sphere of authorization to exercise communal frustrations, aspirations and fears using our bodies as objects of resistance. Like jazz musicians, we employ a call and response technique to augment one another’s intuitive decisions in the performing, filming, and editing process. Tears, laughter, joy, pain, vulnerability, and bravery co-mingle through mental and physical interpersonal explorations. As amatuer scientists, we run experiments of desire on ourselves and each other, observing and documenting the chemical reactions that occur between elements. In recording our findings as specifically and subjectively as possible, we create a fiction that speaks the truth.