‘Soft Power’ is a series of performances born from a research lecture focused on the same themes. With the intention of making the lecture more visual, melodic and emotionally resonant we collaborated with sound designers to develop an audio-visual soundscape and accompanying live choreography. With a library of sound and voice modifications, the sound designers we’ve collaborated with have mixed live voices (in English, French, Hindi, and Taiwanese) together with a library of sound during the performance. This disparate content put side by side often exposes conflicting narrative and hidden power structures. Through this medium, we question the linear and hierarchical structures from which we typically receive information.
This work has been reinterpreted for site-specific performances in Milan (Salone del Mobile, 2017), Paris (Palais de Tokyo), Eindhoven (Dutch Design Week 2015 and 2016) and Munich (Design and Ethics Unconference, 2016).