Yoko Tawada’s Traveling Voices: Film Screening & Discussion with Director HyeJeong Son

Son Hyejeong’s new documentary Yoko Tawada’s Traveling Voices (2025) offers an unprecedented exploration of Tawada’s performative readings and the role of sound and aurality in her multilingual work. Featuring rare footage of Tawada’s readings around the world from 2015 to the present, the film invites audiences to reflect on the relationship between language, voice, and translation in an age of globalization and digital mediation.

In the spring of 2010, a Korean student living in Tokyo became obsessed with the reading “voice” of writer Yoko Tawada, who writes in Japanese and German. This fascination led her on a decade-long journey across many countries, following Tawada’s voice around the world. “I decided to do a human experiment to see what would happen if I put myself in an environment where I only used a completely different language” (Yoko Tawada, Tokyo Shimbun, June 4, 2020). Inspired by Tawada’s words, the student pursued academic research on the subject, eventually became both a filmmaker and a test subject herself, breaking down various boundaries and connecting with the world beyond her native language. Based on 10 years of “voice fieldwork” in 10 countries, the film follows Yoko Tawada and explores the nature of language and voice. It presents the conclusion of a never-ending journey, leaving each question open-ended for the audience to interpret.

The event is part of HyeJeong’s “East Coast Film Tour of Yoko Tawada’s Traveling Voices” and is generously supported by the Japan Foundation New York, the Humanities Council, and the Department of East Asian Studies.