Gabriella D'Costa

Bureaucratic agency/Agents of Bureaucracy
Drawings + Installation

The voice of governance, policy, and compliance form a framework over all other frameworks in a society and thus set the tone of the ideal voice to achieve. This particular voice is generally instructional, operational, or legal. Although this voice sounds and reads robotically, it is created by humans to be followed by other humans. The goal is to transcend manual behavior in favour of automation.

A society is not a dichotomy between ventriloquist and ventriloquised; Perpetuating and internalising an automated voice, agents of bureaucracy are themselves ventriloquists and ventriloquised. Agents of bureaucracy are the mouthpiece for a bureaucracy's otherwise acousmatic voice. Their personal inner voice is supplanted by their own ventriloquy and this goes on to ventriloquise a population.

Ultimately, there is no master ventriloquist; there are only the ventriloquised ventriloquising. This work seeks personal agency for the bureaucratic agent; to insert a sense of self into this voice, a self which persists despite being ventriloquised.

Gabriella D’Costa is the name given to a particular collection of thoughts, feelings, reactions and interpretations localised into a body-interface which they acknowledge as the default mechanism they can utilise for tangibly manifesting the aforementioned localised collection of thoughts, feelings, reactions and interpretations

Documentation