Sarah Hablützel

Territorial Fight

“Territorial Fight” follows a student and her mentor through various vocal and speech exercises. The student is subordinated to the trainer during the lessons, ready to be guided and shaped by him. Yet from a certain moment she becomes the author and the authorial narrator. As a voice over, her speech overlays the command-like speaking of the teaching situation and self-confidently opposes it with another register. The teacher’s words are decreased and cut off as the student finds a pictorial language with which she describes how song birds assert their territory through their singing, and therefore raise their claim to space. The films consists of a collage of several lessons with a voice and speech trainer from a music and theatre school. The learning objective of the student was the desire to speak in a space-occupying way.