SCUM MANIFESTO Echoes 66

tion. To read is always to interpret, and here not simply because the reader is an actress. This video raises the question: how can we work on a text, how can we say it on screen, how can we create a listening space in which the listener’s position shifts from being docile to being receptive? How can a text be heard as a manifes-to around a dining room table? Let us point out that the domestic setting has often been re-appropriated by feminist artists (to men-tion just the example of the kitchen: Martha Rosler, Semiotic of the Kitchen in 1975 and Chantal Akerman, Blow Up My Town in 1968 and Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels in 1975). The im-ages of a world flowing from the television remind us of the role of communication:

“informing means circulating an order-word. Police decla-rations are appropriately called communiqués. Information is communicated to us, they tell us what we are supposed to be ready to, or have to, or be held to believe. And not even be-lieve, but pretend like we believe. We are not asked to believe but to behave as if we did. That is information, communica-tion. And outside these orders and their transmission, there is no information, no communication. This is the same thing as saying that information is exactly the system of control”. 2

Here the voice of the “Manifeste” frees itself from the voices of the information and the power (which, it must be remembered, have long been masculine) and from the temporality and rhythm that they impose on the listener. Carole and Delphine engage in a conversation with the presenters’ voices or the TV news reports’ voice-over commentary, giving them a voice and interrupting it,