QuaRANTine Choir

About

A Series of Audio Performances for Cell Phones

with Nora Turato, Moriah Evans, Felicia Atkinson, Rosaceae, Leyla Yenirce, Astrit Ismaili, Hanne Lippard, Nguyễn + Transitory, and others

New track each Tuesday 6 pm (CET), starting June 2nd 2020 till open end

Location: Soundcloud

QuaRANTine Choir is a growing compilation of commissioned audio works by an international group of artists from various backgrounds. It is dedicated to the rant as an artistic format, motivated by feminist and queer perspectives. We understand the series as a scattered yet collective choir, that is delayed only by time and distance. Each artist departs from the previous rant hence adding a new voice to the QuaRANTine Choir.

For the digital community and audio project QuaRANTine Choir, we are inviting at least 10 artists and musicians to play around with whatever ranting and queer/feminist noise means to them and to create a short audio work. Cell phones or other mobile devices serve as recording as well as listening devices. Since each rant is sent to the next artist as starting material, the whole series also works as a slowed-down artistic chain reaction.

Starting Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020 one new episode of the series will be published weekly on Soundcloud.

Rant #1: Nora Turato
The first audio performance is by Nora Turato, an Amsterdam-based artist who in her performances uses a cacophony of voices and fuses a mixture of source materials in an attempt to dismantle the preconceived ideas of femininity. In her performances, artist Nora Turato incessantly calls for an “almost nonsensical desire to be loud, too much, unstable, possibly insane in public and to make something out of it,” largely because the general public seems not quite ready to have a woman shriek, rant, gossip, and whine at them, or stare them down.

Rant #2: Moriah Evans
Moriah Evans is a New York-based choreographer who works on and through forms of dance and performance. Her choreographies navigate utopic and dystopic potentials within choreography/dance/body, often approaching dance as a fleshy, matriarchal form between minimalism-excess.

Rant #3: Felicia Atkinson
The third track entitled “None of the Two Things” is by visual artist, experimental musician, and poet Félicia Atkinson. Félicia’s work deals with topics of deep listening, cut ups, silence, noise, and language and is a combination of improvisation and superimposed composition, as an abstract woven material, where the voice meets electronics, acoustic instruments, and electric distortions.

Rant #4: Rosaceae
The fourth audio track is by Hamburg-based artist Rosaceae. Rosaceae’s work fuses video, performance, and sound extending between ambient, occasional harsh noise, and collages of sound artifacts. It often returns to Kurdish resistance fighter’s songs, folktales, and found footage thereby creating a futuristic form of resilience through sound.

Rant #5: Astrit Ismaili
The fifth audio track is by Astrit Ismaili, an Amsterdam-based performance artist born in Pristina, Kosovo. Their work proposes bodies that consist of both imaginary and material realities, using alter egos, body extensions and wearable musical instruments to embody different possibilities for becoming. In Astrit’s practice the act of singing is used to explore the role of voice in pop culture and identity politics. Witnessing the Kosovo war, being a child pop star and identifying as a queer person are experiences that influence their practice.

Rant #6: Hanne Lippard
The sixth audio performance “Intestine!” is by Hanne Lippard, a Berlin-based artist whose practice playfully and wittily explores the voice as a medium and how language can be visually powerful. Lippard’s texts are rhythmic and performative often taking its context as a point of departure for a critical yet often humorous investigation that reveals flaws and defects of dominant normative structures.

Team – Concept & Production: Line Spellenberg & Sandra Teitge; Additional Music: Kolbeinn Hugi; Visuals: Wiley Hoard
Supported by: Goethe Institut Chicago & District * School without Center, Berlin