March/April Chronicle by Ros del Olmo & Marika Vandekraats

                                                                                         12/4/22, 21:34 Gmail - DAI in Bergamo

An early invitation consideration for

Dear Francesco and Spettro,

Here we are the uneven distancing voices from A Blues for essential workers (Alexandra, Amal, Derek, Emmeli, JP, Krista, Marika, Ronja, Ros, Till, Vera & guests).

Sorry for ghosting you on our last day of study group in Bergamo. We dared to ghost a sound specter. We got absorbed by the work of hosting, collaboration and maintaining some kind of a bridge  between all the vectors we brought up. Let’s say that it is more like a funiculare: not only does it link two points in space, it also gains depth slowwwwwly. But the point is we want to walk this bridge with you for other moments among all things we have learnt.

We have shared an itinerant sense of spatiality these past few days. This distinction between site and place is pretty much linked to performativity, according to Nick Kaye; that is to say, that “site-specific performs a place”, but a site can also be a theoretical position from which to depart. Could we add a site for rescheduling, properly apologizing and perchance, proposing at the same time, from the same place, but through the voices of many?

From collective to collective, we imagine this reaching email as an intimate public space: an opportunity to hang out; we hope you are still up to it. What are your desires for this space? Amal and Krista put this question forward the first day and we like to reuse things, as you probably came to know. We have changed the location of the microphone so many times. On top of a pear, on a chair, on a table(s), on the floor of this building that used to be a music conservatory.

This invitation is meant to not be finished. It has been considered to be burned and blossomed at the same time, we got lost and spoke languages in the historic part of the city. Time got us, it taught us that plans have their spatiality also. The wind went in and out and Alex and Ronja said that coins and wings are so opposite in a way. We listened to each other speak and breathe, Vera said, and walked through a foreign space, but also, as Derek pointed out, it could have reminded of childhood.

We pictured ourselves as logistical beings that fail; we tried to imagine the sonic architecture of (small) disobedience, questioning the practice of scripting, zooming on the materiality of the spaces and the voices that we used. What are the silences you’re related to? Which are the healing noises that comfort you? Borrowing this question from Till at the time he was improvising a micro-morning-rave in our COOP room. What could our desire paths be? This concept of opening a way through grass that Emmeli feels so close to, could somehow have a role in us meeting each other some other time, with our real faces.

We produce our radio material as we hold our invitation: in media res. These last few weeks A blues for essential workers kept thinking about how hosting may become a thoughtful complex practice. How hosting is done and, eventually if it is possible to transmute it into collaboration. A bilateral invitation fond of coming together with Spettro. A feeling message! To have our moment of silence as well, “a close listening time”, JP would say, far away, in the outskirts of the instrumentalization of informality.

Maybe we are using a kind of uneven persistence in reaching out. BTW, we have a milestone which is the potentiality within looping, repeating, and setting and we have the feeling you may be quite experienced with it. We had as well an amazing talk with the artist Muna Mussie about how collective narration is extracted away from the individual and how a past can be made by speaking about the future: a counter micro and macrohistory. 

Could this correspondence be a sound diary, or as Marika named it “a dear diary/DAI-ry practice”? Marika is also the finger behind the photos of us in this email. We convey a diary as a story holder with this habit of building a vocabulary, not only etched with oneself. We prefer this ongoing vocabulary to a visual archive placed with an intention, which we will probably  come back to, but in the meanwhile, we propose taking time and attention to listen, a quality time that is what we want to share with you.

So, we want to accompany you until the next time we reach Italy, so what would be cozy for you? We all are learning how to compose a letter. What do a party and a letter have in common? We already felt welcome by you and we don’t want to miss the chance of choiring that feeling. The first thing we do is ask who is in the room with us, with you? When and how would you like us to come in?

Again, with maybe too much poetic warmth and hoping to listen to each other soon,

(please, read with different pitches)

A blues for essential workers

A blues for essential workers

A blues for essential workers

A blues for essential workers

                                                                                                                                                 Playlist:

                                                                                               The Burning Bridge, Yawning Portal

                                                                                                   Please Forgive Me, Bryan Adams

BACK TO INTRODUCTION: COOP study group ~ A Blues For Essential Workers