No tags yet.
Christine Sun Kim was born as a deaf. As a deaf person, she believes that sound is not a part of her life. However, she then realized that sound is very much part of her life. She said, living in this fully sound world as a deaf person is like she’s living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviours, and norms without ever questioning them. She rationalize and reframes her relationship with sound and spoken languages by using audience’s voice as her own and composing visual scores with sign language and musical symbols. These attempts are made to raise questions on ownership of sound, explore oral languages as social currency, deconstruct preconceived ideas about silence, and above all, unlearn sound etiquette.
She tells the audience that American Sign Language (ASL) is like music. She tells the audience some symbols used in ASL and she also invite all the audience to practice them together. In the end she said – the part that I like the much- that just because ASL has no sound doesn’t mean it holds no social currency. We need to start thinking harder about how to define social currency and let the ASL has its own form of currency- without sound. Probably as it is done, that could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society and after all, people will understand that they don’t have to be deaf to learn ASL and they don’t have to be hearing to learn music.