Matter and Pessoa de Lima | Jasmina Al-Qaisi

Marc Matter & Manuel Pessoa de Lima, Ververwandlung (Kafka-Beats) for voice and sampler

Jasmina Al-Qaisi, swimming in a huge watermelon ran by seeds, a food poem for text, voice, field recordings

To mark the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka's death, Marc Matter & Manuel Pessoa de Lima approach Kafka's Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) in an experimental sonic way. A selection of individual, frequently occurring words from Kafka's novella are fragmented, serially combined, and superimposed so that the language is transformed into music. Not only the transformation of writing into sound, of words into repetitive rhythms and textures, but also the transformation of meaning and linguistic structures, of prose into fragments, as well as the successive transformation of acoustic text material through repetition, follows the idea of metamorphosis.

In swimming in a huge watermelon ran by seeds, Jasmina Al-Qaisi deals with various wetlands such as peatland, swamp, marsh, bog as transition areas from dry to permanently wet ecosystems, with biotopes of the past and future, and with her own memories that are nourished by oral tradition and translation. Most recently Jasmina has focused on wetlands and imaginaries built around them with a focus on the Danube Delta and various peatlands.