Artur Zmijewski’s (Poland) work is the second part of a project called Singing Lessons, created with the help of deaf teens. It was recorded in 2002 in the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig where Bach spent so many years and where he is also buried. Deaf or very hearing impaired boys were asked to sing Bach cantata 147: ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’. It includes a text asking Jesus to hear their voice as part of their Christian confession. Similar to other works by Zmijewski, there is a struggle to overcome disability, to ignore it, but this attempt is doomed to fail and it is the viewer-listener who is finally asked to overcome social norms that define the boundaries of normalcy and to accept the disability. In a conversation with Sebastian Cichocki, Zmijewski describes the conditions under which people with no disabilities accept the disabled as “the terror of normality” and the disabled only get a ticket into the ‘non-disabled’ world when they try to imitate normal behavior.
The work blurs the clarity of the sung text and the failure of the singers to sing it, makes it incomprehensible, but the significance of the original work is still present in the physical effort, the real attempt to correctly sing expressed in the singer’s facial expressions and body language. Sound and image together create meaning that is impossible to express, such that lies between the original text of the cantata and a new text but understood.
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