Gravitational Shift
With the choral composition Gravitational Shift we seek out the melodic qualities of women’s affective birthing sounds.
To inform the composition, we are now gathering recordings of childbirths. The recordings themselves will not be shared.
They will serve merely as raw material for the creation of the composition, which consists of the melodies revealed by time-stretching and transcribing women’s non-verbal labour sounds.
The project is a collaboration between classical singer and composer Katinka Fogh Vindelev and visual artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen as part of Kølbæk Iversen’s artistic research project Neo-worlds: the transformative potentialities of fright between Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) and Aarhus University (AU).
Received recordings will be time-stretched and their melodies transcribed into notes. After the transcription, the recordings themselves will not be used—thus the only ones listening to your birth recording are the authors of the work, Fogh Vindelev and Kølbæk Iversen. Through a series of workshops with a group of women who were traumatised during labour, they will turn the many melodies—'labour songs'—into a choral composition.
The work and its production process thus operate on several levels: While the composition aims at bringing the voices of birthing women into the public realm through the eventual performance of the choral work, the very act of voicing the transcribed sounds of your passing during the workshops might help those for whom that passage was complicated.
As such, the composition seeks out the power of the aesthetic to reconfigure trauma in ways that verbal narrative and direct representation may not: By transforming individual non-verbal expression into an inter-subjectively shared form of communi-cation, the composition explores the social (and potentially constructive, generative, and worlding) dynamics of gestalting collectivity through singing.
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).
Recordings and questions can be sent to:
—Katinka Fogh Vindelev
& Marie Kølbæk Iversen