Entangled Speech: Speaking through oral microbes

The backdrop for our performance is the entanglement of humans and their microbes. In detail we explore the relation between human-centered language and microbes, aiming to give their relationship more meaning and structure. The performance itself unfolds as an entanglement between the researcher, the research objects and the method of investigation. Oral microbes transgress the boundaries between themselves and human speakers. They react to individual phonemes with specific changes in their ecology, their needs authoring human voicescapes, disembodying and decoupling the voice from the rational and essentialist humanist subject. Both voice and microbes are agentially cut together-apart: what looks like a separation through the technical apparatus we use to enfold the intra-actions actually proves the mutual entanglement of both entities. With this cut, language loses its subject, its owner and sovereign, with phonemes and microbes becoming two co-hosts that contribute to the voicescape equally. The material apparatuses in our performances, which enhance and visualize non/human reactions, produce material phenomena through specific causal intra-actions. In its intra-activity, the matter is not a passive object to be observed and analyzed but the microbes becoming co-agents, taking part in the discursive practice. They are already material-discursive and that is, according to Barad, what it means to matter. Diffraction becomes a matter of differential entanglements, which do not intertwine or other the voice and microbes as separate entities, but prove their inseparability by becoming materially connected. Microbial entangled speech may be more important than has been assumed and has so far been overlooked as a connecting layer between the human body and its non-human inhabitants.