The Shape of a Right Statement (2008)

Overview

In this video, Tsang explores language as an instrument of power. She re-speaks a text from In My Language, a video posted to YouTube in 2007 by autism activist and blogger Amanda Baggs, in which, using a speech-generation device, Baggs describes her experience as an individual who communicates nonverbally in a predominantly verbal world. Tsang recites Baggs’s address verbatim, using a technique she calls “Full Body Quotation,” in which she conceives of her own body as a mimetic “playback device” that replicates the tone, inflection, and rhythm of the original monologue as it plays through an unseen earpiece.