Gravitational Shift
The choral composition Gravitational Shift is developed on the basis of recordings of women's affective birthing sounds, which we have time-stretched and transcribed. We invite you who found giving birth a traumatic experience to participate.
Together we develop the composition through a series of workshops taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, during the autumn of 2019 and the spring of 2020.
You will not be hearing the actual birthing sounds, but only
the melodies that we have found by time-stretching and transcribing birth-recordings prior to the sessions.
These melodies will form the basis for experimental voice
and body work under the guidance of classical singer and composer Katinka Fogh Vindelev and visual artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen—both fellow mothers and (post-)labourers.
A frequent characteristic of trauma is the sufferer's feeling of isolation and alienation. By transforming individual expressions of pain into a shared experience, our composition will explore the power of collective aesthetic processes to reconfigure trauma in ways that verbal narrative and direct representation may not.
A part of the work with Gravitational Shift therefore focuses specifically on making sharable what might initially have been a lonely and isolating experience to explore ways of reinstating a sense of trust and belonging.
The format was tested and developed during the spring of 2019 with a group of opera and fine art students at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO).
Gravitational Shift is part of Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s artistic research project Neo-worlds: the transformative potentialities of fright between KHiO and Aarhus University (AU). Ultimately, the work with the composition will lead to a public performance bringing the voices of labouring women into the public realm.
If you are interested in participating and/or have questions, please don't hesitate to contact us:
—Katinka Fogh Vindelev
& Marie Kølbæk Iversen