Endangered Sonic Bodies: Situated Knowledge in Performer-Led Intermedial Electroacoustic Practice

This presentation examines how performer-led intermedial electroacoustic practice constitutes a form of situated knowledge production, proposing the "female sonic body" as an endangered conceptual world within Western concert music. Historically shaped by colonial, patriarchal, and score-centred epistemologies, the performer’s body—particularly when gendered—has been disciplined and rendered epistemically neutral. In response, this project develops the "female sonic body" as an analytical, critical, and methodological framework through which embodied, culturally inscribed, and minoritised sonic practices emerge as epistemic resources. Drawing on four audiovisual electroacoustic works created within the Féminas Sonoras collective, the presentation demonstrates how experimental artistic practices—including intermedial composition, improvisation, archival activation, and collaborative creation—function as modes of embodied analysis. Family archives, vernacular sonic memories, and genealogically transmitted imaginaries operate as cultural sedimentations that persist across generations, resurfacing through performance as forms of artistic and epistemic agency. These practices resist processes of standardisation and epistemic homogenisation by affirming situated, irreducible modes of knowing rooted in lived experience. By integrating artistic practice and critical reflection, the project proposes a transferable experimental methodology for artistic research, demonstrating how intermedial performance can generate new epistemic frameworks and sustain endangered conceptual worlds within contemporary artistic practice.