camille norment studio

“I have sung all the songs there are.” Toni Morrison, Sula

DT
I think the lullaby is also interesting in the sense that it is known as the most gentle form of music. Yet its intention, its function is to send a child to sleep.

Sleep is a kind of death. In terms of this polarization between a state of intimacy and a state of anxiety, the lullaby stands in the middle of that. The lullaby is guilty gentleness because often the parents want their children to go to sleep for selfish reasons as well as thinking about the well-being of their child.

We talk about people sleepwalking, people falling asleep and lullabies in relation to an obliviousness to the seriousness of things. So I think of all these revelations that have come up in recent years including the recent ones about offshore investments, the environment, and certainly immigration and so on, there is always a feeling of things being too complicated. It is too much to think about. People think it has nothing to do with me. They tend to fall asleep. I am as guilty as anybody. What can I do about it? There is a retreat into some kind of..

CN
..some kind of state of sleepwalking. And yes, how does one talk about it constructively, and more importantly, how does one act constructively in relation to it? It can be difficult to locate the locus of action in the face of so much anxiety. The ‘selfish reasons’ associated with the lullaby seem to parallel those in society. The sleepwalking is a kind of numbness we hold onto until the problems get too close. Very few seem to actually be willing in practice to fundamentally alter their way of living for the sake of someone else or even to secure a decent future.

DT 
.. a state of sleepwalking because it is too big and too complicated. You can’t see how you can deal with it. So I think for me that is very interesting in relation to this strange presence of terrifying figures like the sandman in the context of lullabies. The sandman will come and throw sand in the eyes of children with the result that their eyes fall out if they don’t sleep. [ i ]  Through him one finds the threat of what will happen if you don’t fall asleep. We also have a threat of what will happen if we do fall asleep.

CN
The intimacy of the lullaby, in a sense, is expressing the fear of the child’s future. Will this child wake up the next day? Today we have similar fears regarding the world's future.

When I was looking into the etymology of the word lullaby, one of the accepted beliefs is that it came from the Hebrew term “Lilith a-bi”, which later became “Lilla-be”. It meant “Lilith be gone”. This phrase was inscribed on an amulet that was placed around the child’s neck before putting it to sleep, in order to protect it from Lilith the demon who might take its life during the night.

And of course we now call the phenomena sudden infant death syndrome, but back then, the child’s death was because of a female demon. This female was responsible for preventing a future. I thought that was very interesting because it placed the mother within a polarization between a virtuous and sinister woman. It is a wonderfully rich and complex social space that is encased in this most gentle form of music. It’s layered with veils upon veils upon veils. The lullaby offers a lot of insight into culture, society, and gender relations.

DT
And it seems also to relate to a form of shamanism - witchcraft as it used to be called. Or enchantress. All of these words, often depicted in female figures. You get it in the mythical figure of the sirens who sing the sailors to sleep. Here is the idea of a song being so powerful that it can cause unconsciousness. It’s considered something very beautiful and soothing and it relates to childhood. The ‘dangerous’ power of a woman can sing someone to sleep. More generally it points to a fear of women. If a woman can sing a child to sleep what’s to stop her from singing everybody to sleep? That leads us into the area of seduction and enchantment which is very much a double-edged sword.

CN
Singing a lullaby enacts a performative voice – a voice that seeks to actually evoke action or reaction through its union of voice, language, and of course music, rather than simply represent something. Through the ages, there has been a lot of fear around the power of music itself, so when coupled with the performative voice, it’s not surprising that these associations have been made and projected upon the female body.  Historically, women have been assigned the roles of sooth-sayer, wailer (hired crying for the dead), etc., and have been burned for supposedly speaking in tongues. Many lullabies were actually formed of nonsense words; the sound having meaning over the sense. Of course some of this was also a strategy for teaching the language of a culture through the sounds of its words, rhythms and rhymes. In my early years in Norway, I was attracted to the simple phrase, “So’ Ro”. The phrase is derivative of “sov rolig”(“sleep calmly”), but functions more as a catalyst sound. Because of its abbreviation and depending upon the pronunciation, it could also refer to “Så ro” (“Row like this” or “So, row”). Boats and the sea are common images in lullabies around the world. There are many depictions of tragedies at sea, but it is also representative of a desire to reach better places. I imagine a contemporary lullaby might refer to today’s vast migration of peoples – their desires and their tragedies.

DT
There is an interesting connection there with the lullabies and spells. Spells are associated with witchcraft. A lot has been written about witchcraft and the misogyny associated with that - the fear of women - spells being one of the main techniques people were frightened of. It comes back to what we talked about in the beginning - this strange alignment of the innocent and the malign. The enchantress, the witch who is casting a spell. It seems the most natural beautiful innocent thing for a mother to do with a child, and yet there is this undercurrent of fear that is about, fear of women themselves. And of course desire and tragedy at sea are themes in many stories that place women as the objects of desire and fear.

CN
My thinking in this regard has always tried to maintain a global perspective. I’ve been speaking with some other colleagues about how to understand the state of gender relations today with respect to equality and even basic human rights for women. Today’s media exposes us to so much on a daily basis – gang rapes in India, acid thrown in the face of women in Iran’s second largest city, sex slaves of young girls as a war strategy by extremists, etc. It’s hard to know to what extent this represents a movement backwards, but regardless, the tragedy remains clear. It’s very disturbing and leaves a deep impression in me. These current events also seem symptomatic of the anxieties and crises hat that have spread around the globe. Even in the U.S., there are movements that would essentially return women to the home. Leaving work to the men, and only having babies is seen as a solution to the economic crisis and to the threat of immigrant populations.

In Norway, when once tutoring a young female art student, I raised a question regarding feminism and her artwork. She stopped me dead in my tracks and said “No, I don’t have anything to do with feminism”, as if it were a dirty word. That was something that belonged to the past and should be left there. It seemed to even be a point of embarrassment to be associated with it today, to be associated with the voice of struggle – it was somehow a bad thing. I was shocked, most especially, to hear it from someone who grew up here. But in a country like Norway you can almost be convinced that equality has been achieved. It comes pretty close in many respects, but of course, inequality remains a fact.

In the discussions with my colleagues, a common thread arose – an underlying fear of emancipation that seems to have been deeply instilled in cultures throughout the world. It’s not at all new, but seems to be rearing its head again with fervor.

All of this complexity is embedded in the very simple form of the lullaby. To a certain extent it is this complexity that we are struggling with now. It’s cyclical and repeats.

DT
Lullabies are also characterized by repetition. In relation to musical form these songs can go round and round. There is a relationship there to music that is designed to send people into trance.

There is this fantastic exhibition at the Wellcome Collection called “This is a voice”. One of the first exhibits in there is a voice disguiser from Nigeria. There is also a paper written by Henry Balfour who was the first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. He worked in Nigeria and he wrote this very interesting paper about voice disguisers and he collected some and you can now seem them in the Pitt Rivers.

The purpose of things like the voice disguiser and also sacred flutes and all kinds of initiation ceremonies was to frighten women and children. All of those strange sounds made by voice disguisers and sacred flutes - they represent the voice of spirits. They were considered to be the voice of spirits. The message to women and children was that they were the voices of terrifying monsters. To me it relates to the lullaby somehow - at least in the idea that if you don’t fall asleep something terrible will happen. The sandman will come along and throw sand in your eyes. With the sandman we go into Grimm’s fairytales and all that material.  

CN
And in this case you have directly targeted women and children – those who supposedly need to be controlled.   

DT
That’s right. […] It’s like a refractive view of the lullaby which is, as you say, all about softness of the voice, the gentleness of the voice. You know, if you try to get a child to sleep and some small incident happens and they are awake. The lullaby voice is almost like muzak.[ii] Muzak was recorded on the principle that there shouldn’t be any dynamic disturbances, there shouldn’t be any structural disturbances. It is the same with lullabies, it’s just round and round. Soft voice. And then you have this kind of anti-lullaby with the voice-disguisers, which are the terrifying voice that maybe is the creature spoken about in the lullaby. In all these cultures where you have the initiation ceremonies, you have the lullabies as well.

[…]
But the lullaby is based on something being beyond isn’t it? There is a world beyond the world of appearances and creatures can come out of that world. And the strange thing about that is when you go to sleep, particularly as a child, you slip into that world beyond.

CN
Right, exactly. I was thinking a bit about the lullaby itself as a bridge between the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious realms. It functions to transport you from a waking being to a sleeping and dreaming being, but also metaphorically. The lulling music functions as a Hegelian veil that is placed over the realities of the world, and yet that veil is lifted somewhat through the lyrics of the lullaby – those which speak to human traumas.[iii] However the child cannot even understand it. I think there is a very interesting relationship here. You have the real world and all of its possibilities from splendid to horrifying, and you have the pacifying fantasy that meet in the same space. The lullaby thus sits in the cusp of the uncanny – something that should remain a secret, but has actually been revealed.

DT
It’s funny because I always think of music itself as being the bridge between - and here we could talk in psychological terms of subconscious or we could describe those states in different ways according to cultural context. Music can transport us to a different world. But maybe it transports us from the world of things to an ineffable world.

If you think of music as in someway or another performing that function, lullabies, you could argue, are the apotheosis of music. They are one of the ultimate forms of music along with these forms of rituals which are specifically designed to allow in a mythological world or the world of spirits or are designed specifically to enter it.

The big difference is that as a parent you are trying to portray sleep as a safe world of the unconscious. But for a child who suffers terrible nightmares and dreams and is frightened of the dark it is often not very convincing.

DT
I want to ask you.. How are you working with these ideas?

CN
The focus of this work stems from my long fascination with feedback. There is a swinging pendular microphone that is swinging to and from a speaker. The speaker will have a single voice, Sofia Jernberg, and she is vocalizing a form of a lullaby. So you will hear her voice from that one speaker but the sound of the distorted voice will fill the room from above.

DT
So it’s a reference to Steve Reich piece - Pendulum Music?[iv]

CN
Yes, both works have similar base elements, but function different formally and conceptually. I wanted to work with the tonality of the voice formally; the tone of the voice as it merges with the tone of the feedback itself. But also the quality and notion of distortion. I wanted to really work with this notion of the voice itself as the carrier between these worlds - the otherworldly. It sways between the intimate space of a singular voice from one speaker, to the distortion of the surrounding environment; between the conscious and the unconscious voices in the lullaby and in society, in a way. This swinging motion relates to previous works of mine, which were derivative of the traumatized, lynched body within a society.

DT
Feedback is interesting also in relation to contemporary conditions. The Guardian has started a campaign about internet trolls and bullying and so on. One of the things that comes out from their analysis of their own below-the-line comments is that the people who get attacked most viciously are women or people of color. We all know that any woman who writes anything about feminism is threatened with rape and so on… It seems to me it’s a kind of feedback. It is a kind of amplification and distortion that surrounds a message whatever the message is. Like feedback it grows out of control. And it seems to be part of the process - when some people are allowed access to speak about things it can very quickly grow out of control. Feedback is interesting because it is often a threshold state, isn’t it? In performance, the presence of feedback is always a threat. And you can work with that or you are in fear of it.

CN
In my work some of this could very easily get out of control because that is the nature of feedback. I like that factor. I like the fact that it has the potential to get out of control and that part of the work is the need to make it manageable again. Then it becomes a performative piece that really parallels this need for control within society or this constant state of controlling, not just feedback but the voice itself and the repercussions of what is being said.

DT
There is a lot of artwork now that tells you what it is doing straightaway. There is an obsession with transparent communication. All its secrets are given away immediately. And I don’t feel that it is true in your work.

CN
Yes, the work emerges out of a vast space of research and conceptual interests, but I’m first interested in creating a compelling experience which functions somehow on its own. The work is derivative of a constellation of intersection ideas that traverse time and cultural reference, but it should not seek to illustrate them. There are a lot of things that can be said about it with words. I consider that separate. If I feel that a work that I’ve made is still sitting in the realm of text and it’s not able to function on its own, then it’s not completely resolved yet. It happens. Inevitably, sometimes you come closer than others, but that is really what I aim for. I love knowledge as written information, but I am also very much obsessed with the knowledge of the body - experience, and all the complexities and contradictions that are embedded within. That is why I love music so much. The thing that can’t be explained by words.

Where they meet can be difficult, but I am quite happy that there is a lot that can be said about the work. And I think often the struggle lies in finding the right way to introduce it because you need to have something written down in these exhibition settings, and often long before the work even exists. What do you say without saying too much or too little? How do you introduce the work and still allow it to have its own voice; to allow people to have an experience of it that is not overly pre-determined?

In ironic the contrast between this single delicate voice and the chaotic world around it – a world it seems to produce itself time and time again, in this repetition there is history in a way. The passing down of history through the voice. It repeats again and again through time. That has been a key motivation between this work and of course others before. That experience, that dynamic stasis.

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[ i ] This sinister version of the sandman was also the central character of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story ”Der Sandmann” from 1817.

[ ii ] The Muzak corporation patented a system to transmit music to factories, restaurants and other public places. In the1940s and 50s it developed a format and style for the transmitted music based on its behavioral effect on the listener.

[ iii ] Of course not all lullabies are derivative of traumatic stories, many are the opposite, or even nonsense.

[ iv ] Steve Reichs Pendulum music was composed in 1968 and is an example of what he considered process music. It was based on the idea of suspended microphones swinging back and forth in front of loudspeakers. Each time the microphone passed the speaker it caused acoustic feedback in the form of a short tone. In the work three or more microphones are pulled back and released. They swing back and forth eventually coming to a rest in front of the speakers.