Elyse Goldfinch: Let’s begin with voice. Your work over the past decade presents a dedication to the voice as a discipline, or undiscipline. The exhibition at ACCA, and this very publication, feature your own voice, amongst friends, family, peers, mentors, community members and collaborators. Where did your relationship with voice begin?
Tina Stefanou: I suppose my relationship to voice began when I took my first breath. But before that, it began when I felt my mother’s voice in the womb — the world(s) outside penetrating the inside. It’s pre-identity; it’s planetary. It exists both around me and from me, co-forming a being through relation, always in process.
In utero, you are surrounded by vibration, light, amniotic fluid, sound, motion, and voice. So, I don’t really know if non-voice even exists. As a kid, you're constantly meandering through voice: humming, singing, clicking, yelling, screaming, crying, vomiting (a lot). All of it is metabolic, sounds compelled by bodily-emotional worlds. It’s a kind of voice you can’t resist, vocality that exists before self-consciousness shapes it. I’m interested in when voice is emergent, unfiltered — when it comes before control.
When thinking politically about voice, it connects to broader ideas of the ‘inexistent’, a concept by Alain Badiou where something exists ontologically but is not recognised systemically. Women, for example, have always existed, yet their presence was historically unacknowledged in the public sphere; without the right to participate in so-called democracy, they were denied a voice. This is why the Voice to Parliament was an important moment for this country, a chance to take stock of the politics of representation. The aftermath revealed how power, through its complex manifestations in media, amplifies some voices while continuing to silence others. It also exposed how the State often instrumentalises voices to obscure the work of grassroots movements, deflecting from meaningful and impactful structural change.
It’s fascinating how these expressions — the vocal sounds of the body — eventually get funneled into song or other artistic modalities. There’s a natural transition from metabolic sound to music as a technology of communication, which, over time, can become commodified. Certain encoded vocalities attract attention, become marketable, and hold immense power. I think about dictators when they speak there are distinct tones to their voices. Yes, it’s the charisma of the person, and their particular historical context, but it’s also how that voice carries a message, one that enters and impacts other bodies. Voice isn’t just a romantic space of song, community, and the passing down of knowledge. It’s also a tool of power, one that can empower, but also one that, when stifled or policed, becomes inherently violent.
So, I’m not living in a landscape where I think voice is the answer to everything. It’s a tool, a medium, and a positionality that I engage with to work through problems, both aesthetically and philosophically. A voice — the voice, or voices — exists as a metabolic function of the cosmos, and can be manipulated through various human, social, and political formations of language and media.
EG: Voice traverses back-and-forth between the physical, the social and cosmological body. What about your personal relationship to voice as someone who started their artistic career as a musician?
TS: I can’t remember a time I wasn’t singing for someone, real or imagined. I went to a specialised music high school and started formal singing lessons. There is a magic of learning music with others. I spent hours jamming with different people. I had to up-skill because I didn’t come from a family of symphony orchestra players and didn’t know how to read music. I was sharing classrooms with child geniuses, which at times was very stressful because expertise and elitism are very much part of the music education experience. Everything I learned at music school and particularly how to sculpt sonic experience through improvisation is still key to my practice and survival today.
It was within the institution of the music school, that I realised voice was deeply embedded in the architecture of the bourgeois. Opera, for example, was cultivated as a strategy for a single voice to rise above an orchestra. The same can be said for when Jazz became institutionalised in Anglo contexts, which follow certain codified expectations. But I also learned about singers like Edith Piaf and Marian Anderson — voices that emerged from the underclass and became known through the sheer power of their singing. Their voices allowed them access to something beyond their class position. Voice becomes a form of currency, a way out and into certain space.
There’s a lot of encoding of class within the singing voice because it comes from the labour of the body. The larynx, the vocal cords, the diaphragm, and even the sex and hormones all work together to produce a voice. The voice is directly linked to your physiological, psychosexual, and cosmological makeup. That metabolic, cultural soup of you and your community. How this is cultivated within certain musical traditions is fascinating to me.
Virginie Magnat, in The Performative Power of Vocality, 2021, highlights a crucial point: ‘finding one’s voice’ is a phrase so frequently employed in neoliberal discourse on individual creativity and agency that its implications remain largely unexamined, as if secretly regulated by a tacit consensus about what voice is. This encapsulates how voice, though often celebrated as a symbol of personal freedom, is framed within a narrow context of neoliberal individuality. It suggests autonomy, yet one governed by invisible social forces that dictate who can truly find their voice.
I think of hustle culture and its relentless emphasis on individual aspiration, the pressure to get rich in a world where so many are simply struggling for financial stability. This fixation on the individual voice feeds seamlessly into the neoliberal hellscape we are all grappling with. I’m interested in how voice operates as part of collective maintenance, how it intertwines or navigates the societal toxicity of cultural neoliberalism — a system that constantly makes people feel as if they haven’t worked hard enough to attain a form of cultural and economic capital that some inherit while others rely on luck to access.
We need to turn toward the collective voice to shift this crisis, to redirect our attention away from narrow aspirations and towards the financial markets and structural forces that keep us fighting for scraps. These are the material conditions that shape whose voices are heard. Neoliberalism’s obsession with winners and losers celebrates success as something only attainable by ‘rising out of one’s class, rather than rising with it.’
EG: This turn to the collective voice is particularly apparent in 2022. Why is the hum, as a method and a material, something you keep returning to?
TS: The hum is the elemental, grounding force of everything. All of my works contain hums. First, I must acknowledge and attribute the hum to my Auntie Mary and Uncle Peter, who have an obsession with toning — something they taught me to do as a child. A tone is different from a hum; a hum is a m-sound, but a tone is an ooh sound. The hum operates in a different register. It’s not rooted in ritual in a didactic sense; it can be uttered in passing, not as focused as an ‘om’ or a tone. For me, the hum is a democratic entry point to singing. It’s a way to enter social practice in a very gentle, simple way. Everyone hums. Even some non-verbal people, when they can't use words, turn to the hum as a significant utterance. Humming is pre-linguistic; pleasure and release reside within it. It de-regulates nervous systems, and when done collectively, it reduces cortisol.
The hum is also abiotic in the sense that you can hear hums in the wind, in static radio waves, in guerrilla broadcasts, coming from cooling towers, mines, and machines. It’s a planetary postcard.
took place during the COVID lockdowns, at a time when singing was considered highly dangerous, as open mouths could transmit the virus. It reminded me that there’s never been a time in history when song or singing hasn’t been considered dangerous, or when certain voices haven’t been deemed problematic. Throughout history, certain songs and forms of singing have been banned. For example, in Greece, you couldn't sing or even hum songs from the Rebetiko tradition, which originated from the underclass. Under the authoritarian regime of Ioannis Metaxas (1936–1941) and during the 1940s (including the period of Nazi occupation and the subsequent civil war), Rebetiko was stigmatised as subversive and immoral by both the left and right.
I’m fascinated by how songs are used in protest — when many bodies chant together, it’s often our last line of non-violent resistance. This highlights the power of song and voice, their spell-like quality, which poses a threat to the authority of the state, or what Michael Taussig calls the Magic of the State. The hum becomes a subversive tactic, a sonic totem, an antidote to a very nervous system, gently smuggling in songs and melodies.
The hum is where momentum can build—a type of fielding. With , COVID added a new and different significance. I wanted to find a way to sing with people in person, and I realised that your mouth is closed when humming, so the danger is taken away — it became a kind of vocal mask. It was a simple invitation for anyone in the community in and around Kandos to join me and hum along the main street, this also included alpacas, dogs, and run down post-industrial spaces.
The action took place on the day of the national election, and Kandos had just experienced significant fires the summer before. In addition, with the virus affecting breath and voice, the hum became a way to restore. It’s not about good singing; it’s about repair, the ability to communicate in a way that empowers you to act in the world. Our collective hum was also recorded for ten minutes on community broadcast radio. This meant that the news, or the political commons, was interrupted by a type of pneumonic or planetary commons.
The hum became a living, sculptural moment, in person and on the airways, that existed in our bodies and beyond its live action, as an anarchive, housed within our bodies, the bodies listening, the birds, surfaces, asbestos, satellites, and particles. Once sound is made, it ripples out infinitely. This is what constitutes the longest part of .
EG: Following on from vocalities, language is also an important tool in your work, particularly in how you use language to straddle, or even code-switch, between different art forms, classes, and worlds. How do you consider the sometimes paradoxical, and always layered, role of language in your work?
TS: Masking and code-switching happen all the time. Code-switching, like language, is something you learn or mimic. I think it’s about survival, about fitting in, maybe even shame. You almost go to school to learn how to code-switch, especially if you're from the working class or a non-English-speaking background. It starts at a young age. You're told to stop singing or make noises and start speaking ‘properly.’ I have a vernacular and accent that I can turn on, signalling in certain spaces that I am neither a threat nor an outsider. I’ve learned these things, and they give me mobility and access across different social and ‘professional’ contexts.
When I work with different communities, I try to speak as I am now, but I’m also aware that I need to unlearn some of the codes I’ve picked up from being in art-academic spaces. There are also certain logics I don’t understand in some of the very Anglo spaces I work in, and that’s because I come from a migrant working-class background. Some things just won’t get embedded. My Grandma appears in some of my films, speaking in her Greek way, which isn’t the same as other Greek ways. The tongue, while wild and flexible, made to learn, call, and respond, is also situational and habitual.
I don’t think language is only spoken, articulated, or prescribed — silence is just as vital. Whether as a space for reflection and receptivity or as the absence of advocacy, silence carries meaning. Listening is language, and that’s why I work with horses, because they’ve taught me about body language, about attunement, not only abstractly or conceptually, but in a life-or-death manner. When you’re on a horse and you move this way or that way, the horse may not understand what you want, and it might buck you. The same goes for working with children who have learning difficulties — making space for silences and awkwardnesses is essential. It’s okay to giggle or sigh for no reason; that’s a type of language too. I think the pervasive, civilized colonial tactics of the Anglo-bourgeois, really limit a poetics of difference, stifling imaginative emergent qualities and beautiful surprises.
EG: The poetics of difference brings us to your method of social practice, which requires a great amount of sensitivity, humility, and also humour. Tell me about how you approach your work with collaborators and communities?
TS: It feels really natural to me — it’s not a strategy or methodology. Every person, animal, or situation demands a different approach, a different gathering. It’s about finding ways to be more comfortable with myself in any given context, without feeling the need to perform for certain echelons.
I often find myself in contexts that might seem mundane, but over time, the qualities of the relationships and the place begin to ask something of me. I usually approach new places and people as a singer, and that seems to be what starts the conversation. Because the voice is so nomadic, I often end up singing for people or with people at any given point — sometimes just a tone.
I remember traveling to a remote farming station in WA when a farmer introduced me to their friends and asked me to tone for them. They weren’t looking for a song, just a single note. So there we were, in the middle of somewhere, far from cosmopolitan living and access, and I was toning for a group of strangers. A thread usually begins like that. The rest comes much later.
EG: How do you get from the thread to the performance?
TS: We are performing together, yet that performativity isn’t tied to a project outcome or a genre of performance art tied to the white cube, even though I’m part of a community of practice. It’s deeply experimental and situational. I’m not looking to make a clever connection for an outside audience, I am interested in another forms of performance from within. The performativity, or what I call the unperformed, highlights what already exists, the potential in a meeting.
For instance, the pony girls are incredible at handling big horses. By the time we filmed in 2022, we had already spent years workshopping, hanging out, and learning how to ride and navigate through voice. But they were also teaching me about horse anatomy, handling, riding, care, and cleaning. There was a mutual learning taking place.
I find it incredible that these teenage bodies — coming of age, going through puberty — are managing such large bodies between their legs, activating muscles in their thighs, groins, ankles, adjusting posture and breath just to stay on the horse. I thought, well, that’s already something.
When we came to filming, they already had the tools. They knew how to project their voices. They knew how to communicate with their horses. What else was needed? Yes, it was performing and filmmaking, but what was actually being empowered in that moment is something so hard to define. It’s where something else emerges, what I call more-than-art-enviroments. It’s not necessarily about creating an ‘artwork’ it’s about seriously playing together and making it count. By counting I mean accounting for its presence. And by adding a costume (thanks to my collaboration with Romanie Harper), by making it glow for them, you’re emphasising what is already being transmitted.
EG: Another work that took place around this same time was There is a 2022. To accompany that film, you wrote a text titled Peasant Surrealism. Can you expand on what peasant surrealism means to that work and your broader practice.
TS: I suppose it comes from growing up close to my family and continuing to care for my grandmother — we actually care for each other. There's also a deep melancholy that comes with knowing they never had the chance to be performers or artists, or to be professionalised through certain modalities. There are all sorts of complicated reasons for this, which are very much connected to gender, trauma, and generational access. When a population moves from one place to another, they take their histories, their habits, their ghosts with them. And sometimes, those things reconfigure, mutate, transform, sometimes even pervert, into something else. That’s where peasant surrealism exists for me. It’s a type of estrangement — emphasising the strange in estrangement.
My grandmother is deeply superstitious. She still practices rituals from the village, from agrarian ways of being, from subsistence economies. The evil eye, for example, not just to ward off envy or admiration but also to protect the land when growing food. These protective tactics transpose into the Anglo-Australian colony and then morph into middle-class aspiration. What happens when people from the peasant class come to Australia and start making money from their labour? My family became factory workers and were able to buy land in Wattle Glen. And what happens when these values hybridise — when peasant tongues, superstitions, and ways of being are passed down, mixed with the pressure to assimilate into the ‘Australian Dream’? It creates a kind of surrealism of being.
It’s like a method for making audible the echoes and invisible tendrils of these estrangements. I do that through costuming, ornamentation, instrumentalising, movement and voice. I do that through collaborating with animals because the peasant knows about working and living with death. They know about food-making, pickling, tending, preserving, preparing meat. My grandmother is still doing those things. She’s still pickling. She’s still skinning rabbits.
When my family arrived in the 1950s, like so many migrants, they were treated as subpar. Yet, at the same time, the love of ancient Hellenic culture, its philosophy, its history, was used by the British Federation to justify British supremacy. According to them, Ancient Greece had declined because it had mixed with the East, with the Ottomans. So the British, they argued, must not mix with the Indigenous population as to not become like modern Greeks. Instead, we were flattened into stereotypes: Con the Fruiterer, the perpetual working-class migrant.
There is also the form of surrealism, which emerges from how physical labour and the spoils of the land are circulated into markets, dividends, debt and surplus, to become another type of estrangement. Peasant surrealism, in this context, becomes a performative strategy to materialise these abstractions through collective voice, music, and film. It is closely linked to my work around agribusiness sites and economies in rural Western Australia. In this context, Agripoet(h)ics arises, where performance, agri-materials, and fieldwork create a space for examining how resources function, circulate, and challenge our notions of what constitutes the local.
EG: You created a taxonomy to loosely categorise the elements that make up your existing body of performance documentation which becomes the in the exhibition. Can you expand on how you developed the taxonomy?
TS: The taxonomy is a way to manage the mass of footage — around 800 clips, many of which might be considered leftover B-roll from twelve films — that will be generated across multiple screens. I’m interested in how the destabilises what is considered a useful image or performative moment by disrupting the linearity of a film. It aims to return the editing process to the magic of chance (thanks to collaborators Wil Normyle and Steve Berrick), a form of divination and improvisation, in which the audience has an active effect via the sensor that will shift the orientation of the films altogether. The clips, which would otherwise be discarded, are reorganised into a new score. The categories within the taxonomy — human, machine, animal, abiotic, fibre, landscape, and industrial — are labels that give these elements a home and a situation in which they can respond to one another, allowing each one to be acknowledged in its own right. It’s also a way of recognising that the relationship between cinema, animals, and the materials of place is deeply intertwined, and that the zoological gaze, tied to taxonomy, highlights what is already present and problematic, making heard the often unnoticed connections between exhibition making, human, non-human, and moving-image.
EG: Going through the taxonomy with you, what’s incredible is understanding the breadth of your collaborations. You have worked with friends, family, teenagers, farmers, singing groups, elderly horses, the pony club. Now we have Matthew, who is the performer and collaborator on your new film commission 2025. How did you first meet Matthew? Tell me about the process of developing the new work together.
TS: I met Matthew by chance, through my partner Joseph Franklin needing a dirt bike to ride around the farm. He found Matthew on Facebook Marketplace, where he was selling this beautiful Suzuki DR350 bike. Matthew is based in Doreen, just about fifteen minutes from where we are. When Joe went out to see the bike, he didn’t initially know that Matthew was blind. When Joe asked if he could take the bike for a ride, Matthew replied, ‘Just don’t steal it. I won’t be able to see where you go, I’m blind.’ Matthew went on to describe how he navigates the world through voice and touch, and Joe made the connection to my work. A few days later, I called Matthew, introduced myself as an artist who works with voice, and expressed my interest in how people form extraordinary relationships with what might seem like mundane things. Matthew responded, ‘I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.’ We had a cup of tea and shared our stories. Over the past three years, I’ve been going out to Doreen regularly, meeting his family, connecting with the bikes — learning things I never thought I would. I’m not a bike person, nor a horse person, but it’s been a kind of para-pedagogy for me, learning to be more sensitive to the world around me. Through this, I have learned how to be a better filmmaker, I’ve learned how to ride through uncertainty, and I’m learning how to repair bikes — it’s a form of skill sharing. I teach singing, and they teach me something else.
When the opportunity for the exhibition at ACCA came up, I spoke with Matthew about the possibility of transforming the space into his world(s). He was so open and ecstatic about it. During the creative development, Matthew, who had never sung before, began humming, making sounds like a dirt bike, and melodicising with me. He has an incredible ear and is great at following sonic direction, as he’s used to being attuned and present when he rides with his coach. He already has these skills in trust-building, listening, and being in the moment. And he has a beautiful voice, which has been a revelation to him. He didn’t know that he could sing. While recording vocal captions one day, he said, ‘What you’re doing is like a syringe, extracting the goodness in me and amplifying it.’ He is working with me in such an intimate way, he’s teaching me as much as I am teaching him.
One incredible moment during filming was when Matthew was riding his dirt bike across the farm, fully suited in his costume, with his coach Wayne, the cameras, and the team. After he got off the bike, he fell to the ground and started crying. He said, ‘This is so big for me. I am free when I’m doing this. This is for my children. This is for the future.’
For me, this body of work isn’t about creating an archive for preservation or adhering to the hierarchies of what’s allowed to remain in the cultural commons, or what is deemed relevant for the art market. It’s about honouring the collaborator and the collaboration in a way that is surreal and magnificent, creating a gift that celebrates their experience and modalities. Which ripples into a richer, more complex and sensitive understandings of the many worlds we inhabit.
This is something that I believe the working class deserves — to be seen in a light that isn’t infantilised, ironic, rough, singular, masculinised, low-fied, or anglicised. This collaboration, like so many, is a way of opening possibilities for practice and crossing the strange divides that arises from a lack of class and interspecies consciousness. Today, Matthew heard the film for the first time, and while he couldn’t see what was on the screen, he heard the sounds, his singing voice, and the way Joseph composed with all of his dirt bikes and extra elements. He heard something that won’t change the world but has changed both of us.
EG: It’s so important to understand the impact this process has had on you and Matthew. You certainly feel a sense of awe in the final act in the film, where Matthew transforms into the evil eye and becomes this heroic character who rides out in into the world.
TS: Matthew’s final apotropaic act — magic against magic — functions as an inversion of the original cinematic actor, Muybridge’s horse. It is a form of representation against representation, where visuality and reproduction collide to produce a new figure; one that resists the overinflation of ‘European Bourgeois Man’ and his self-anointed monopoly on process and reason. Through what Matthew calls ‘Blind Vision’, he is not only protecting himself from the flattening effects of certain representational structures but also shielding cinema from itself. There is a moment in the film where he says, ‘I built this fish tank to imagine the fish inside,’ a statement that profoundly reorients the role of the image. Rather than prioritising what is seen, it suggests that the act of constructing the conditions for perception — the vessel, the social, relational, ecological, and conceptual space — takes precedence. This speaks to what cinema-by-other-means can allow: a dismantling of visual primacy in favour of other forms of sensing and knowing.
In this moment where Matthew becomes totemic, we witness the emergence of liberatory knowledge — developed not through the mastery of vision but through the act of riding in opacity, or without visible light. This process unfolds through a form of co-existence with the dirt bike, an already transgressive, off-road actor — like the horse — that evades the surveillance of the road.
EG: There’s also the imagination of the audience members who will be encountering this work, amongst the field of tactile, sculptural and filmic intersections. What impacts do you hope the exhibition may have on audiences, and for how art institutions prioritise various forms of access?
TS: I hope that some of the questions I’m grappling with, along with what has been explored in collaboration with others, translates into a sensation that can be revisited in many ways, that it continues to open and fold into ongoing conversations. If this exhibition facilitates discussions about access on multiple levels and prompts ACCA to genuinely rethink its position and approach, that would be fantastic. And if it invites other artists and communities with similar concerns or experiences to bring forward what matters to them, then that, to me, is a truly hopeful outcome — one that comes closest to the idea of success.
However, I think we place too much pressure on artists and art in general to be the thing that will change the big problems. We have to take seriously and acknowledge the budget cuts, the limits, retractions, and serious lack of financial infrastructure and protection for the arts and artists. And we need to turn our gaze to the way in which wealth, the state, and value co-construct an environment of precarity, inequality and violence. I think new alliances, understandings, and actions are far more important than hope — hope can feel like a marketing strategy, especially with all the brutality that continues to unfold in Gaza, the West Bank, and how imperialism is enacting itself in the world. The way abstract fiscal entanglements circulate from military-industrial complexes to the arts is something that can’t be ignored. I feel lucky to be here, I don’t take any of it lightly, and I want to bring everyone with me. But we ask a lot of artists in how they cultivate ethics, practices, and approaches for public discourse. I wish institutions would do the labour that so many artists are doing — to take these risks and open up space, to hold finance and power to account. So we can have more spaces to play, experiment, and learn new models of making-with, that aren’t so heavily governed by non-democratic market forces.
Hopefully, the exhibition is generative beyond my own professionalism or individual aspirations as a working-class woman in the arts. Although, I wonder how this exhibition and its effects will shape my practice and ability to continue making with others, I hope it can act as a trigger to rethink access — not just in terms of bureaucracy, OHS, or convenient discourse, but in terms of socio-economic access, mobility, proximities, including blind access in more honest and imaginative ways. We are indebted to each other. I know many people are already doing this important work all over the place. I am just at the beginning, learning and failing — some of it will land, and some of it won’t. But it’s the beginning of thinking through the expanded voice. An invitation to listen more fiercely to other modes of sensing the world.