Mikromusik–Festival experimenteller Musik und Sound Art

Skull ark, upturned with no mast (2017–18)

Composition and conception: Clara Iannotta
Stage design: Anna Kubelik
Lighting design: Eva G. Alonso

Truike van der Poel, mezzo-soprano
Johanna Zimmer, soprano
Karin Hellqvist, violin
Emma Iannotta, dance
Chris Swithinbank, sound

What dimensions of the word »private matter« are actually in the room when extreme external conditions determine existence? Clara Inanotta and Anna Kubelik asked themselves this question when they came across a striking natural phenomenon. In an article, they read about two shrimp that had been flushed into a watering can sponge as larvae. Fixed inside the sponge, the shrimp grew up, received all the necessary nutrients there, and lived out their (unusually long) lives in involuntary seclusion from the outside world. The question now would be: is such a state perceived as natural, if it already occurs in the earliest state of development of a living being? Or do hereditary instincts cause a consciousness, of whatever kind, of the forced restriction of the natural spectrum of behavior and trigger impulses of resistance? In Iannotta’s music theater, four singers, musicians, and dancers, wedged into the structures of an expansive sculpture, simulate the contradictory circumstances of an almost complete restriction of private (instinctual) needs and ask about remaining possibilities for action in states of absolute isolation.

The premiere of »Skull ark, upturned with no mast« took place at the Munich Biennale 2018.