How to Sing an Image? Collective Reading in Practice by Kinga Tóth
In her performances, the visual and sound poet Kinga Tóth 'sings' visual works by responding with vocal gestures to filmed and projected graphic poems and drawings, understanding these interpretations of her visual poetry as three-dimensional 'living text bodies', or, more simply, as 'readings'. In the exploration "How to Sing an Image?", she asks: How can such an individual practice become collective? Can we read images as a group, decode a drawing and then sing it? How can a drawing connect us and lead us to a collective creation process? Can we perhaps even come to a common reading in which we all find pleasure, which we can feel as both shared and as our own?
In a workshop and two essays which you can find below, Tóth explored individual and collective reading practices.
Kinga Tóth is a writer, visual and sound poet, performer and translator. She writes in Hungarian, German and English and presents her work in performances, exhibitions and international festivals. Tóth's publications include poetry collections, visual art catalogues, novels and music records. In 2023/2024, she was a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow.
The work presented here is part of the exploratory research project READING READING: IL/LEGIBLE, realised by Barbara Bausch at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities at the Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. The first essay was published in the volume con·stel·la·tions 03: Illegibilities Reflecting Reading (2025); the workshop was held at the Freie Universität Berlin on 17 June 2025.
Image Credits: Kinga Tóth; EXC 2020