An oneiric symposium of interspecies diplomacies, a dreamlike weekend and a stand for justice.

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Bologna for the first time. I travelled there with Eglė, with whom we perform in The Mountain of Advanced Dreams, a performance by the lovely Mali Weil. I have also provided sound-design for the piece, a night-time to dawn soundscape constructed from tree dear collections of field recordings: Crickets on the mountains around Trento, Italy, a dawn chorus from a village in the Andalusian mountains and birds, winds and insects in the forests around Sulkava, Finland. Perhaps those recordings deserve their own post some time in the future. (I do still have a lot of online-time to catch up, after leaving social media in early 2020 and starting this blog slooowly about a year ago.)

Speaking of sound-design, the festival we performed in, Sensing the Climate, provided us with an extremely nice venue! We set up the show in an old greenhouse, that used to provide saplings for the city gardens and parks, but now hosts a very very lovely cultural center, a cafe, co-working space and of course fruit trees and carps in a small tank. Adapting the sound-design from a quadro setup (for which it was designed) into the multichannel object-audio system the venue had in place was a breeze, thanks to solid technical support and a comprehensive and accessible system. A special thanks to Andrea for navigating SPAT and the PA for us!

As smooth as the setup was, at least for my part, the same cannot be said for the whole weekend though. That is not to say that it would have been bad, on the contrary. Just very very unsmooth, as a good chaotic situation ought to be. The main source of bumpyness, and a certain unpredictable dreamlike quality of the whole weekend was of course the ongoing protests at Bologna, and in wider Italy. As is appropriate when your government fails to take a decisive stand against an ongoing genocide, the people of Bologna were staging mass protests around the city both on the day we arrived and on the day we were supposed to perform. Arriving to Bologna, we were stuck at the airport for quite a while, and received info our whole festival might join the protest and general strike by canceling us as well – which for the right cause is the right thing to do, of course. However, in the end one of our performances did still go ahead as planned, which I was happy about. It is a pleasure to perform, and the topics of interspecies diplomacy, the problematics of co-existence and a certain penchant for utopic and speculative thinking are working in the same vein as the here-and-now calls for justice and everyones right to live that we were protesting for. And protesting we were, too. On the day of the show, we joined the march in the center of old Bologna, and found our way through the streets in a huge, happy and angry crowd. It felt good to take part, and incidentally it was a very very nice way to see the streets of old Bologna. What a beautiful city, and a beautiful stand.

Of course there were also more bumps in the road, like a certain drone flown by an unnamed source at the airport of Munich just when were transitioning from one flight to the next, or me losing my dear copy of Bodies of Water by Astrid Neimanis that I am reading through scrupulously for an upcoming project with Trial & Theatre. Stay tuned for that! I lost it at the same airport of grey metal and depressing views – that is, Munich – as the drone incident happened in, just when transitioning to the other direction. Munich, why all this bad luck? Please let me know. And especially if you reading this happen to stumble upon a tome of hydrofeminism full of scribbles and underlines somewhere in Munich, let me know! Both the airport and the airline declined all help with the matter. I cried a bit when realising the loss.

Well. Maybe the tears had more mixed in them, than just the loss of one book, no matter how important the object. Like life and its pains. Or a release of the dreamlike, overwhelming and intense state of arriving in a city mobilised, setting up within beauty, marching with the masses (70 000 ppl if I remember right!) and performing a piece very close to my heart in such a lovely company. Thank you Mali Weil, Eglė, Giovanni, Bologna.