Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast · Fermynwoods Contemporary Art

Fermynwoods Podcast 19 – Maja Zećo

April 22, 2023·1 hr 12 min·5 clips

Maja Zećo faced aggressive teenagers while performing in a soundproof suit, revealing unexpected tensions in public art.

The season wanders through xylophobia. Subterra sets up woodlands, dark forests, and subterrestrial places before the episode settles on Maya Zeicho's interdisciplinary practice. Her work is physical and sonic. Born in Sarajevo and resident in Aberdeen, she uses performance, sound art, video, and installation to test how soundscapes affect belonging, identity, and locality. Silencer is a restricted walk. Zeicho moves through town and woods in a sensory impairment soundwalking suit, with earplugs and noise-canceling headphones changing what reaches her. That limit does not stay private for long. People nearby try to make sense of the white soundproofing material, explain her condition to one another, or handle the encounter for her. The photographer gets pulled in too. While documenting the action, he answers questions from bystanders, so another conversation forms around a performer who is not speaking. The host hears a void there. Listening back, she notices how the crowd's awareness of Zeicho's blocked hearing makes the empty space feel present, almost tender. Zeicho does not tidy the experience into a neat explanation. She says silence opens different experiences, but she cannot fully recreate what the walk felt like from inside the suit. Only pieces come through. Even steamed goggles matter, shrinking her field of view and making a familiar route feel changed, uncertain, and bodily. The social world keeps pushing in. Curiosity gathers, but the rules of the performance block easy explanation, so gesture has to do the work speech usually does. That friction gives the piece its charge. Silence here is a material condition that changes attention and how strangers share a place. The result feels quiet, heavy, and a little exposed.

As heard by us

Silence becomes social, lonely, and quietly revealing in a performance that changes how a body is read.

Maya Zeicho's Silencer sits at the center of a conversation about a sensory-impairment soundwalking suit that moves through woodland and Corby Town Center, where silence reshapes how body, gender, and voice are read in public.

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Why you'd press play

A soundwalking suit turns silence into a public performance, and the public answers.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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