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Arachnesound: On the ambiguity of non-belonging: In her famous quote from Three Guineas (1938), "As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world", Virginia Woolf captured the spirit of alienation that women have felt, or indeed should feel, vis-à-vis the request of belonging. Such alienation could morph into refusal, but this, as feminist historians of culture know, has happened in very few cases. For the most part, women have buried their alienation, forced by multiple mechanisms of persuasion and induced consent, to succumb to belonging . . . AGF, or Antye Greie, whose creative endeavor is overall an audacious synthesis of electronic compositions, voice, field recordings, as well as of political explorations and re- enunciations of women-centered aurality. In this new work, Arachnesound, AGF, together with her collaborators, sought to work with an enduring language, Greek, and treat it as a tentative record of women's speech but also silence. Effectively, AGF relied on the ambiguity of non-belonging to stitch together a counter-archive of words written, spoken, or -- when she herself makes them up -- associated with women's struggle for language. Greek has been a language steeped in patriarchal social relations, nation- building, and wildly generalized, civilizational 'origins'. The task that AGF set for herself was to compose a music narrative that takes women's efforts to speak beyond the canonical myths surrounding Greek language as a record. It was a difficult task, requiring much research, much listening, much translation, much acoustic imagining. The outcome, however, is movingly rewarding -- and it is so as an encounter of myth and history with the contemporary feminist avant-garde in electronic-music experimentation. Arachnesound draws on a loosely defined corpus of women's spoken word, poems, or sometimes prose, or sometimes sounds that, even if delivered in English as the contemporary global communication tool (AGF's mother tongue is German), their referent lies in Greek myth and/or history..." --Angela Dimitrakaki Athens, (1.9.2020) Features Ismini Samanidou, Reine Linda Nyongo, Savina Yannatou, Maria Arapoglou, Anna Stereopoulou, Nicoleta Chatzopoulou, Maria Papadomanolaki, Katerina Iliopoulou, Dimitra Ioannou, Konstantina Korryvanti, and Marianna Karakoulaki. Includes extended booklet.
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