The Girl Who Never Was

The Girl Who Never Was is the third and final part in a trilogy began with A Lecture on Schizophonia and continued in The Third Man.

In 2008 an American researcher rediscovers the lost traces of the first recorded voice ever: the 148-old voice of a little girl singing the French lullaby ‘Au Clair de la Lune’. One year later another researcher experiments with the playback speed and manages to prove that what the fragment actually contains, is the voice of a full-grown man. This exact same lullaby is the song sung by the artificial intelligence HAL in the French version of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’. As HAL dies his voice performs precisely the same glissando as the voice of the non-existent girl: a high-strung, insistent voice is gradually slowed down into a deep, sleepy and harmless one. The work uses these two voices as coordinates, and explores how a particular insistency, pertaining to the voice alone, makes it the vehicle for certain kinds of inexistencies, as they make their way into our world. The more we try to shut her voice out, the more persistent her song becomes.