A Voice and Nothing More” by Zorica Čolić is a binaural sound installation that examines the psychological effects of living under conditions of increased censorship and surveillance. It considers how the awareness of being watched or listened to reshapes perceptions of the self and the other, blurring distinctions between what is experienced, imagined, remembered, or repressed.
Structured around three loosely related narratives – Animal, Voice, and Dream – the work traces the inner thought processes of an individual negotiating feelings of safety, exposure, and threat. The installation responds to the space itself, including an existing hole in the ceiling. One narrative unfolds as a reflection on public and domestic safety, layered with anxiety about intrusion and culminating in the imagined aftermath of an animal falling through the ceiling. The second moves from a fear of speaking under censorship to questioning whose voices are heard, developing into a conflicted reflection on truth as both eroded and necessary. The third takes the form of a dream, oscillating between flight, the fear of capture and falling, and a sudden, disorienting sense of freedom. Reality, dream, and paranoia intermingle, opening the possibility of release or transcendence.
The script draws from literary sources, fables, political speeches, as well as philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse on truth, freedom, and otherness. Inspired in part by Franz Kafka’s short story The Burrow – an allegory of a creature obsessively securing its dwelling – the work explores the tension between the pursuit of safety and the inevitability of vulnerability. The title references Mladen Dolar’s book A Voice and Nothing More, which examines the complex role of the human voice in culture.
The installation includes sculptures from the series Partial Objects, such as Not Without a Hair on a Tongue, which draws on the Serbian idiom “to speak without a hair on one’s tongue,” meaning to speak directly and without restraint.
