Rhythms, Voices, Rituals – An exploration of sound as a medium to reflect, mourn, meditate, and heal.
Venice’s iconic Palazzo Contarini Polignac will host Rhythms, Voices, Rituals, an immersive two-day event combining auditory, visual, and performative projects that invite us to reflect on how we can harness sound and music as spaces of nurture. The programme explores sound as a medium for reflection, mourning, meditation, and healing, creating a ritual of release that channels visceral, primordial energy through shared sonic experiences.
Across cultures and throughout history, sound and music have been powerful tools for building community, fostering belonging, and strengthening solidarity. Curated by Kasia Sobucka, this programme explores themes of identity, resilience, ancient wisdom, mourning, and reflection. It invites audiences into a restful space, where sound vibrations blend with echoes of ancient texts and stories of resilience. This shared experience evokes collective memory and fosters a deep sense of human connection. Here, sound becomes a vessel of care and a shelter.
The programme unfolds over two chapters of live performances, showcasing some of Poland’s most compelling artists — Wojtek Blecharz, Ewa-Maria Śmigielska, Karolina Grzywnowicz, and Zorka Wollny — alongside British artist Philomène Pirecki. Audiences are invited to experience an immersive opera installation by Wojtek Blecharz, where sound shapes both space and bodies. The concert explores laments as acts of collective mourning and witnessing, including vocal healing practices alongside a neon light installation by Ewa-Maria Śmigielska (from the Phoenix Mantra exhibition). Zorka Wollny presents an acoustic performance, that weaves vocals through ancient Egyptian texts translated from papyruses. Karolina Grzywnowicz’s Palestinian lullabies evoke a form of resistance rooted in sleep and song. Philomène Pirecki offers electronic and ritualistic compositions, exploring the body’s inner rhythms, states of flow and resistance through sound immersion.
Each artist presents a powerful commentary on the intersection of personal and collective narratives, from the resonant echoes of ancient texts to the resilient contemporary voices.
Programme:
Day 1, 21 November 2024
Wojtek Blecharz & Ewa-Maria Śmigielska, Rhythms of Lament
5:00 pm – 8:00 pm
(A durational auditory experience, opera installation)
The Rhythms of Lament invites the audience into a shared space for contemplation and reflection. It offers a continuous auditory experience shaped by vibrating transducers, wireless speakers, a neon light installation by Ewa Maria Śmigielska, and a live performance by countertenor Nathan Julius.
At the heart of this music installation lies the recording of a sound of an artillery shell, a relic from the 1960s war between Israel and Lebanon, now transformed into a sound installation composed for 19 wireless speakers. Struck with mallets, the shell emits a gong-like resonance — a reflection on its violent past, recast into a meditative hum.
Audiences are invited into a space equipped with transducer speakers transmitting vibrations rippling through the bodies of the listeners, creating waves that travel through the body and provide a visceral experience that blends rest and healing with deep sonic immersion.
In this journey, the forces of destruction and healing converge, providing a moment to pause, reflect, and be enveloped by a collective meditation on sound’s transformative power.
The Rhythms of Lament emerges from the deep need for shared expressions of melancholia, offering a space where grief and sadness can be felt and released. The soundscape becomes an alchemic ritual of transformation, where destruction is reconfigured as a sonic meditation — a collective act of mourning and solidarity.
Wojtek Blecharz — music, concept
Nathan Julius — countertenor, piano
Ewa-Maria Śmigielska — neon installation from Phoenix Mantra Exhibition
Kasia Sobucka — curator
Ryan Nestor — recordings of artillery shell
Nicolas Navarro Rueda — costumes
Day 2, 22 November 2024
Karolina Grzywnowicz, Bedtime
3:00 pm – 7:30 pm
A listening session featuring Palestinian lullabies Bedtime presents a poignant collection of lullabies sung by Palestinian women, recorded in refugee camps like Aida, Dheisheh, and Qalandiya. These songs, rich with cultural memory, offer comfort and resistance against the erasure of identity in the face of conflict and displacement. Intertwined with ambient sounds from daily life in the camps, these lullabies carry personal and collective stories, blending nostalgia for home with the harsh realities of exile. This listening session stands as a powerful political statement against the oppression of sleep deprivation as a tool of torture. Through these songs, Grzywnowicz amplifies the voices of Palestinian women, revealing how the simple act of singing a lullaby becomes an enduring form of resistance and cultural preservation.
Zorka Wollny, May You Embrace Me
5:00 pm – 8:20 pm (20-minute performance at the start of each hour)
Zorka Wollny’s acoustic performance May You Embrace Me, is based on ancient Egyptian papyruses from Elephantine Island. Zorka transforms these millennia-old texts into an evocative contemporary musical performance. Invited vocalists breathe new life into the writings, resonating with universal themes of longing, belief, and connection. The minimalist acoustic approach emphasizes the emotional power of these ancient stories, while Zorka’s compositions merge past and present in a space where history and personal reflection collide.
Philomène Pirecki, Hypnagogia/Oxygenate
8:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Sonic exploration of body rhythms and states Hypnagogia/Oxygenate, developed by Philomène Pirecki, delves into the liminal space between wakefulness and sleep. Using her own heartbeats, breathing, and vocalizations, Pirecki crafts a sensory experience shaped by delta and theta brainwave frequencies. As the performance weaves between dissonance and harmony, the work evokes the fragile, yet potent, boundary between consciousness and dream. The result is an immersive, visceral exploration of bodily rhythms, emotions, and psychic resonances.
