Collective Voice Detector XXL

How can we create a situation where everyone involved has a voice and can temporarily undermine existing hierarchical structures? How can we facilitate a meeting while considering the participants’ different backgrounds, professional perspectives, rhetorical skills and power positions?

Collective Voice Detector XXL is a new interactive performance that examines these questions. The project functions as an ‘open score’ exploring the boundaries between art and consultancy, spectator and player, and performance and game. Its central question concerns working together, communicating and decision-making within groups. STUK and Nina Glockner invite groups in advance as audience and participants who work together in daily life as part of an organisation, board, company, association, political initiative, and so forth. Collective Voice Detector XXL offers these groups a way to meet each other in a different context and, through artistic and playful means, exchange their usual mode of communication for a more dynamic way of thinking and doing. This process makes it possible to understand one another’s perspectives better and discuss a problem together.

Several elements allow the participants to connect cognitively and physically. For example, a number of life-sized objects are used, somewhere between props, board game pieces and sculptures. The game’s rules, which combine individual and collective decision-making steps, also contribute to this cognitive-physical connection, as does Nina Glockner’s performative guidance.

This performance is an exercise in mapping complex tasks and challenges brought by internal organisational, social and political changes. The game combines an aesthetic and sensory approach with verbal and non-verbal communication and encourages the creation of new pathways within a different aesthetic space.

Nina Glockner thus offers the group new ways to think, communicate and act – with one another instead of alongside one another.

Collective Voice Detector XXL is based on former research/board game for the town of Maastricht developed in collaboration with the Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht.