FOR MANAUS
We got the invitation to compose a piece for the Improfest 2021. In our work we try always to connect to the situations and political context we are living in and we found it presmptuous to ignore the actual situation Brazil is going through these days. Last week, mid of January, the city of Manaus went through one of its hardest times. Because of the immense amount of hospitalized Covid-19 patients all the oxygen supplies of the hospitals ran out. People were not only dying because of the illness and mismanagement of the pandemy but even because of the missing supply of oxigene tanks for the hospitals.
This audio piece is therefore dedicated to the people of Manaus. It uses original material from social media and sounds of oxygen tanks, contrabass and electronics.
Composition and performance:
Klaus Janek – contrabass and electronics
Milena Kipfmüller – social media samples and electronics
both artists are part of the collective [SNDNG STTNS]
Camera: Barbara Dulley, Milena Kipfmüller
Sounding Situations works as a collective and follows an ongoing artistic research developing “performative instruments” under the perspective of their philosophical, conceptual and artistic production processes. Therefore the work looks always for a strong relation to the environment in its material, acoustic and political context. Collaborations range from musicians to choreographers, visual artists, authors and theatre and film directors.
[SNDNG STTNS] work is a careful composition of staged situation in urban spaces and live music placed theatrically in what can be discovered in loco. Since 2014 the collective explores theatrical situations between musictheatre, staging and composition with live music, instruments, recordings, samples, speech and live editing. Often radio, transducers and mobile loudspeakers are installed or move with the audience through a theatre, through cities, join a walk or a longer hike through a metropolis till a mountain valley. A focus of the work lies in the live processing of original musical material, field recordings and language sounds, that, interconnected, change their original definition and become a net of sounding meanings. By the use of compositional and performative strategies the perception of the audience is shifted between the reality and a fictive acoustic imaginary.
The longterm ongoing work in residencies and commissions brought [SNDNG STTNS] to create various adventurous performative situations and to give academic lectures in universities around the world, such as Germany, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Brasil, Israel and Rwanda.