VOICINGS: Recent Episodes
firefly frequencies
Situated readings and performances of texts of all genres chosen for their urgency, singularity and poetic force. Writers sharing passages from their work. Words and silences coming to voice...
"Siempre" is part of "Unisonoa", a project by Ixiar Rozas which is both a collection of poems made up of a single line and a sound work. These were born and grew at the same time, somewhere on the horizon, and each one follows its own path together with a number of collaborators. A composition between rhythm, line, phrase, movement, undulation, vibration, voice, whisper and affect.
Thank you Ixiar for this wonderful piece!
Ixiar Rozas is a writer and researcher who works at the threshold between voice, language and sound. Her narrative and poetry works, stage texts, reviews and short essays have been published in different countries and languages. Some of her titles include “Negutegia” (2006, Pamiela; 2009, Itaca), “Ejercicios de ocupación. Afectos, vida y trabajo” (2015, con Q. Pujol, Polígrafa), “Beltzuria” (2014, Pamiela; 2017, Enclave), “20.20” (2016, con M. Salgado), “Unisonoa” (2020, Pamiela; Bandcamp), and “Sonar la voz. 9 ensayos y 9 partituras” (2022, Consonni).
https://www.tabakalera.eus/en/ixiar-rozas/
A passage from Saidiya Hartman's "Lose Your Mother" read by Savanna Morgan during the African Art Book Fair / Dakar Biennial OFF.
Thank you Savanna!
Thank you lumbung radio
Savanna Morgan reading a passage from Saidiya Hartman's "Lose Your Mother" (chapter So Many Dungeons) during the African Art Book Fair, Dakar.
Thank you Savanna!
https://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/21155/savanna-morgan
Lose your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route
file:///Users/macbook/Downloads/[Saidiya_V._Hartman]_Lose_Your_Mother__A_Journey_A(z-lib.org).pdf
In the late June early July of 2023, a European regional Gathering of the Ecoversities Alliance took place in a very particular place – Arneo, South-East of Italy – a land where peasants struggled for the right of their land since 1950s, being repressed. Now this territory is again at risk.
Activists, artists, carpenters, refugees, and bike recycle enthusiast got together under the crowns of a unique forest of Arneo.
We’ve used this occasion to collect some Voicings and Recepies for Disaster. As part of Ecoversities Alliance we fully support the struggle of Arneo people against Porsch industry enlargement in the area.
*artowork on the cover for this episode is by Shahzia Sikander.
Portrait of Adrienne Rich (2019)
In the late June early July of 2023, a European regional Gathering of the Ecoversities Alliance took place in a very particular place – Arneo, South-East of Italy – a land where peasants struggled for the right of their land since 1950s, being repressed. Now this territory is again at risk.
Activists, artists, carpenters, refugees, and bike recycle enthusiast got together under the crowns of a unique forest of Arneo.
We’ve used this occasion to collect some Voicings and Recepies for Disaster. As part of Ecoversities Alliance we fully support the struggle of Arneo people against Porsch industry enlargement in the area.
In the late June early July of 2023, a European regional Gathering of the Ecoversities Alliance took place in a very particular place – Arneo, South-East of Italy – a land where peasants struggled for the right of their land since 1950s, being repressed. Now this territory is again at risk.
Activists, artists, carpenters, refugees, and bike recycle enthusiast got together under the crowns of a unique forest of Arneo.
We’ve used this occasion to collect some Voicings and Recepies for Disaster. As part of Ecoversities Alliance we fully support the struggle of Arneo people against Porsch industry enlargement in the area.
An extract from the second part of Adania Shibli's novel "Minor Detail", a haunting meditation on war, violence and memory that cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.
Adania Shibli, who divides her time between Berlin and Jerusalem, was due on 20 October to be awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, an annual prize given to women writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world. On Friday, however, the LitProm association that hands out the prize announced it would postpone the award ceremony “due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering”. In its original announcement, LitProm said it had taken the step to postpone the award as a “joint decision” with the author. But Shibli’s literary agency responded that the decision was not made with her consent, and that if the ceremony had been held she would have taken the opportunity to reflect on the role of literature in these painful times. An open letter, signed by more than 350 authors admonished the organisers of the Frankfurt book fair, the world’s largest trade fair of its kind, saying it has “a responsibility to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down”.
Translation from Arabic: Elisabeth Jaquette
Voices: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni
For English translation please go to
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/speech-of-the-red-indian/
All our solidarity to the Palestinian struggle!
Thanks to RADIO ALHARA for the amazing program UNTIL LIBERATION. https://soundcloud.com/radiokara
In an address to the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature, English writer, art critic and long-time supporter of Palestine John Berger gave a moving reading of Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza”. Kanafani was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad in 1972.
A warm thank you to Radio Al Hara
https://www.radioalhara.net/
In homage to one of the most uncompromising figures in the history of cinema, Jean-Marie Straub, this remix presents an assemblage of film fragments by Huillet/Straub including "Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene", "En Rachachant", "La Guerre d'Algérie", "Kommunisten" and "Noir peché".
Merci Jean-Marie and Danièle, you and your films will live with us forever!
A reading of the first part of Etel Adnan's poem SEA, from the book "Sea and Fog".
Voice: Graeme Thomson
Recording and mix: Silvia Maglioni
"If My Words" by Canadian-Palestinian poet and performer Rafeef Ziadah, from the album "We Teach Life".
Ho sognato Pauline Oliveros. Era dicembre, vicino al mio compleanno. Era lì, con me. Allo stesso tempo da qualche parte. Sentivo il suo calore. Come terra nella terra. Dentro. Le palme delle mani. Ascolta. Il silenzio un respiro che diventa solido, morbido, continuo. Ovunque.
La ringrazio. Ti ringrazio Pauline.
Questo testo è il tentativo di trascrivere e fissare attraverso le parole un sogno misterioso che feci durante il periodo di primo lockdown in Italia. Ho trascorso quattro mesi in una casa disabitata e le uniche relazioni che intrattenni erano con gli autori e le autrici dei libri che portai con me. Queste letture influenzarono profondamente il mio immaginario onirico: i sogni che feci in quel periodo avevano il sapore di una rivoluzione immanente e la speranza per un cambiamento radicale che poteva pian piano farsi strada.
Un immaginario post-apocalittico si aprì davanti ai miei occhi: dalla penombra di una stanza angusta vidi una metropoli di edifici grigi, abbandonati e divorati dalla vegetazione, rovine di una civiltà ormai scomparsa e forse mai rimpianta. Ma all’alba di un nuovo giorno, entità inedite si raccolgono per scacciare con le nude mani il male del mondo.
This text is an attempt to render into words a mysterious dream that I had during the period of the first Italian lockdown. At that time, I spent four months in an uninhabited flat and the only relationships I had were with the authors of the books I took with me. These readings profoundly influenced my dreams. For these months, my dreams had the taste of an immanent revolution and the hope for a radical transformation that could slowly make its way.
In this dream, a post-apocalyptic imaginary opened before my eyes: from the dim light of a cramped room I saw a gray metropolis of abandoned buildings, overgrown by vegetation, ruins of civilization that has now disappeared and perhaps never not be mourned. But at the dawn of a new day, unprecedented entities gather to chase away the evil of the world with their bare hands.
An extract from "Experiments in Imagining Otherwise" by Lola Olufemi
Voice: Chara Stergiou
La mia vita e cambiata inaspettatamente: da fotografa viaggiatrice sono diventata la custode di un nuovo bosco. Ma cosa ha mosso questo cambiamento di rotta? Leggendo le parole del libro di Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux, "Devenir Vivant" ho trovato la spiegazione...
Voice - Viola Berlanda
Orsa maggiore nasce come incontro tra due artisti sonori nel piano della parola poetica. Il pezzo si compone nell’esplorazione della poesia come esperienza di un pronunciare misterioso, del suono di lingue diverse, e della lingua come suono. Il testo condiviso crea il suo spazio tra frammenti di field recording e composizione sonora, entrando nella notte nelle parole dell'Orsa Maggiore di Ingeborg Bachmann, in quelle di un suo discorso tenuto in occasione della consegna di un premio per un suo radiodramma, e in quelle di un altro tempo di Sergio Atzeni tratte dal suo “Passavamo sulla terra leggeri”, dove poesia è suono fondativo della nascita della relazione tra una comunità umana e la terra. Insieme danno vita a una visione fisica, dove suono, poesia ed essere al mondo sono insieme terra e cosmo.
Orsa maggiore was born as an encounter between two sound artists in the plane of the poetic word. The piece is composed in the exploration of poetry as an experience of mysterious pronouncing and language as sound. The shared text creates its own space between fragments of field recordings and sound composition, entering in the night in the words of the poem Orsa Maggiore by Ingeborg Bachmann, in those of a speech she gave on the occasion of the awarding of a prize for one of her radio plays, and in those by Sergio Atzeni taken from his "Passavamo sulla terra leggeri” (We passed over the land lightly), where poetry is the founding sound of the relationship between a human community and the earth. Together they give life to a physical vision, where sound, poetry and being in the world are together earth and cosmos.
Testo visionario onirico a episodi: Marco Polo narra a Kublai Khan, vecchio malinconico le città attraversate nei suoi viaggi.
Voice - Cinzia Di Meglio
An excerpt of the Words of the Zapatista Women at the closing ceremony of the Encuentro de las Mujeres en Lucha, from the book "When the Roots start moving: To navigate Backwords/ Resonating with Zapatismo" eds Alessandra Pomarico & Nikolay Oleynikov (Archive Books, 2019).
Voice: Alessandra Pomarico
“And what is an authentic lunatic? He is a man who has preferred to become what is socially understood as mad rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. In its asylums, society has managed to strangle all those it has wished to rid itself of or defend itself from, because they refused to make themselves accomplices to various flagrant dishonesties. For a lunatic is also a man whom society has not wished to listen to, and whom it is determined to prevent from uttering unbearable truths…”
At the invitation of Harut Simonyan, Knar Khudoyan reads passages from Antonin Artaud’s “Van Gogh, le suicide de la société” in Armenian for firefly frequencies.
Voice: Knar Khudoyan
Music and mix: Graeme Thomson (All sounds taken from the voice recording and Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu)
To read the whole text in English
http://www.dougashford.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Van-Gogh.pdf
An episode in memory of Peter Lamborn Wilson/ Hakim Bey, visionary poet and theorist of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, featuring Chaos from the album T.A.Z.
In this extract from a recent talk he gave in Palermo, South African artist William Kentridge reflects on some of the inspirations behind his recent chamber opera "Waiting for the Sybil" - from Somerset Maugham's story "Appointment in Samarra" to the spinning mobiles of Alexander Calder's Work in Progress.
Cinema De Seta, Palermo - May 3rd, 2022
An event organized by Accademia di Belle Arti Palermo and curated by: Daniela Bigi, Marcello Faletra, Stefania Galegati, Rosa Persico.
Translation: Dominic McElwee
A big thank you, William Kentridge!
We recorded Fred Moten in Paris, at the Cité internationale des arts, on the 17th of February 2022, when he gave a warm and generous reading "Perennial Fashion (Presence Falling)". This is one of the poems he read. Thank you Fred!
Are You One of These Motherfuckers?
Yeah, yeah you are.
And you don’t seem to be tired of this suspension,
which is falling, whirling and unworlding storm for precision in mourning.
We really don’t respond to these motherfuckers.
The discipline is our imagination, the whorl is our yardbird school, a choir of uncertain azure in scratch galaxy, the violent measure of a gleam in her eye. You can stop calling here for some kind of response to these motherfuckers.
What we got for y'all is precision in mourning and turbulence.
We got a way of taking substance away in circling and surfacing, the slow obliteration of pain in pleasure, a release of coffle on dusty highway, an ongoing unravelling of quilting.
We always got to be killing these motherfuckers in the edge of morning after morning of absolute, uncountable new remembering.
The immediate breathes through us before anything, but these motherfuckers can’t understand that.
We are instruments of clinical ecstasy and if you want to listen you got to give up everything, you got to give up listening to sharing in folding
in the bottom in oceanic engineering in the ungrammatical suffering of scourge and smile and babies in the nonresponse.
When we salvage our surfacing and circling from your savage enclosure, it will be this miracle, right now, singing through can’t breathe forever in this world and we ain’t talking to you, motherfucker. It’s gon’ keep on being this miracle, our praise, our right xxxxxxxx, and all the thickened kitchen anarchy of our phrasing, the denotative detonation of am I blue sometimes I’m blue, bye and burn before y'all everything burning.
Recording and mix: Graeme Thomson
an exerpt from a poem:
Communism is your heaven –
Darwin, Duchamp, and Gerhard, too.
In the name of heavenly communism,
you must scribble your name on paper a thousand times.
Tiananmen, who said you were more valuable than Tibet?
Maybe, Hai Zi† died for this and became India under the wheels.
(translated from Russian by Olga Mexina)
full poem in english, kazakh, and russian can be found here
https://www.angime.com/tilek-xianjiang-eng
If you are not rain, my dear
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
And If you are not tree, my dear
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
And If you are not stone, my dear
Be moon
In the dream of your beloved one, be moon
[So spoke a woman
to her son at his funeral]
Excerpt from Mahmoud Darwish - "A State of Siege"
READ MORE
https://www.arabworldbooks.com/en/e-zine/a-state-of-siege
A long-distance, sonic correspondence between artist Dora Garcia and researcher Maria Rosa Sossai through the words of Alexandra Kollontai and Daniela Attanasio, between Spanish and Italian.
Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary who was appointed commissar of social welfare after the October Revolution and later one of the world’s first woman ambassadors. She fought for abortion rights, secularized marriage, and paid maternity leave—and considered “comradely love” to be a political force.
Daniela Attanasio is an Italian poet and literary translator based in Rome.
Kollontai’s fragment, "Marriage and the Problem of the Family”, is taken from "The social basis of the woman question” - you can find the English translation here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm
Image: Dora Garcia, “Red Love” (photo Jean-Baptiste Beranger)
RADIO BRUTAL nasce come proseguimento radiofonico-visivo di MANIFESTO BRUTAL. Ricerca balbettante, viaggio poetico-sonoro attraverso le parole di tante e tanti.
In questa traccia inveisce e si nutre tra e con Brecht, Pasolini, Nina Cassian, Vivian Lamarque, Antonia Pozzi...
CHE MONDO IN DESERTO GIORNO IN SOGNO MUTA:
http://bit.ly/manifestobrutal
Built from an unwieldy conversation about cancerous embodiments, "Transit in the House of Cancer" is a breathing exchange between the curator Camila Marambio and the ecologist Bárbara Saavedra – who for years have worked together as part of Ensayos, a nomadic research program based in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Their house is shaped by interruption, solitude, fear, context, ecology, love, death, autopoiesis, language and marginality .
To transit in the House of Cancer as a visitor it is essential to be guided:
The sound artist Ariel Bustamante is the guide. How to enter? How to exit? How to be within the breathing of others? How to sustain breath, life and language beyond the life/death divide? What to take or leave in the House? These are some of the questions that will structure the architecture of the transit.
"Transit in the House of Cancer" is an extension of the forthcoming book "Sandcastles: Cancerous Bodies and their Necro/powers", co-authored by gender scholar Nina Lykke and Camila Marambio.
Preview
Read More
https://www.gessnerallee.ch/en/event/530/Transit_in_the_House_of_Cancer
George Caffentzis reads Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" Part II, evoking through the figure of Moloch the ravages of capitalism, the military industrial complex and corporate state power.
Recorded by Jesal Kapadia
This poem of hope, solidarity and togetherness was shared by Silvia Federici during the Assembling of January 3, 2021 - a collectively constructed "ceremony" welcoming the new year hosted on zoom by 16 Beaver Group and friends.
TESTING ASSEMBLING
http://centreparrhesia.org/assembling/
“Je suis une voix off” assumes an agency and embodiment of what is absent, playing on various metamorphoses of a voice recorded on a dictaphone. Interrogating different modalities of presentation, enunciation and knowledge transmission, language becomes material trace as the voice is switched "on" while sliding “off” through gaps, mechanical pauses, rewinds, corrections, stammerings, pitchshifts, voluntary and involuntary overdubs, disintegrating and recomposing, exposing fictions of gender, efficacy and neutrality of speech and relocating them in an indeterminate border zone where the body allows us to hear the multiple voices that inhabit and pass through it as it speaks and is spoken, giving voice to echoes of the unimaginable.
Mick Taussig reads "In the Beginning was the Firefly!" from his recent book "Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown"... as a good omen for Firefly Frequencies!
More info about "Mastery of Non-Mastery":
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo46980359.html
- Read by Sara Naili
(To our homes in our absence after war and abandonment)
Sadness is
visiting the ruins of your house in dreams
and coming back without dust on your hands.
Delicacy is
watering the wilted flowers
in your neighbour’s garden
because yours have perished under the bombs.
Distance is
the geography of domination
that separates cities a thousand miles apart.
In one you leave your laundry on the clothesline
in the other you stretch out your hand to the wind
and try to take it in.
To the hand that hovers over the doorbell of the old house
who can say:
“Homes do not belong to those who have had to leave them”.
CROSSING THE WATERS 2
Voice: Sara Naili
Sound and mix: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni
Widad Nabi is a Kurdish-Syrian poet born in Kobani. She lives and works in Berlin.
- Read by Fateh Hamdan
If you go down that road, at the city's edge,
the one that leads to the refugee camp,
if you run into a bunch of kids at the gate of that school that looks like a prison,
if you come across seven who stare at the threshold of silence,
if you see a lithe little boy with eyes that spark with the intelligence of the entire world,
you can be sure you've found my friend Taysir.
His family had a country that was stolen in broad daylight.
In his restless eyes you will glimpse the vibrancy of the birds of the stolen land.
The cement houses,
the memory of zinc,
the scary crackle of the occupying army's radios during the weeks of curfew,
none of it has dimmed the spark in his eyes.
Only once has he seen the sea.
Nothing will convince him not to return.
During the long days of curfew they would say : ”Once curfew is over, we will take you to the sea”.
One night, when the curfew was over, they told him: ”The sea is closed at this hour. Go to sleep!”
He didn't sleep that night, he imagined an old man
closing up the sea with an enormous zinc slab that stretched from star to horizon to sandy beach,
and securing it with a big padlock, bigger than the one his father’s shop had in Omar al-Mukhtar Street.
Then he imagined the old man heading off home.
So if you go down that road, at the city's edge,
the one that leads to the refugee camp,
if you glimpse two eyes that spark with the intelligence of the entire world,
would you please ask if the sea of Gaza has been opened
or if it's still shut.
CROSSING THE WATERS 1
Voice: Fateh Hamdan
Sound: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni
Music & mix: Graeme Thomson
Najwan Darwish is a Palestinian poet. He lives between Jerusalem and Haifa.