Vaim Sarv, “Oral Frictions”, performance 



“Oral Frictions” is a freely improvised piece of song, noise, and spoken word. It's about singing and storytelling as work, as physical and social labor, as collective practices that renew our ties to each other and the land. The piece involves a sounding body engaged in a desperate search for historical consciousness about these practices—in face of the hardcore loneliness of the present moment. This is about land and kin, dispossession and desire, solidarity and silence. It’s about mapping the world system and how it has differentially disciplined our bodies, voices, and ears through the interplay of brutality and privilege. The work resists this discipline by drawing upon the wealth of alternative vocal and somatic practices embedded in Baltic Finnic traditions such as Estonian runosong.