World premiere at SPOR Festival
Eva Reiter and Karin Harrasser’s Eupepsia/Dyspepsia is a sound museum. It depicts the history of 18th century Bolivia, and the violent effects of its colonisation by Spain. Through a large-scale work envisioned as part-conference, part-performance, Reiter documents the Indigenous music of the country, and the way it travelled to Europe through Jesuit missionaries. In this appropriated music, Reiter and Harrasser identifies the dominant colonial legacy of the Western world, a history often made invisible in service of the favourable revisions of history we are taught.
Connecting different musical traditions and merging them into one another, the sounds of Reiter and Harrasser’s piece actually suggest silence, the attempts to quell cultures and the symbols that came with them. The word eupepsia refers to ‘good digestion’, and serves here as a metaphor for the West’s easy, free-flowing destruction of the world around it – as well as the seemingly natural way it adopted and passed on music and art as its own. In Reiter’s own words, ‘Eupepsia offers hybrids not as solutions or remedies, but as sound-objects to ponder the longue durée of cultural violence.’
This production will also be presented at Wilde Westen and Time of Music in 2022.
Works by: Angelica Castello, Jorge Sanchez-Chiong, Robin Hoffmann, Marin Marais, Diégo Ortiz, Eva Reiter og Fredy Vallejos
Narrator and projections: Anna Mendelssohn
Viola da gamba, recorder and additional instruments: Eva Reiter
Electric guitar and additional instruments: Tom Pauwels
Percussion and additional instruments: Tom De Cock
Sound & light: Alex Fostier
About Eva Reiter
Eva Reiter studied recorder and viola da gamba at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and at the Sweelinck-Conservatory in Amsterdam, where she received both master’s degrees “cum laude”.
Currently she is very active giving concerts as a soloist as well as performing with different baroque ensembles, orchestras and with ensembles for contemporary music (among others Ictus and Klangforum Wien). She was awarded the “Publicity Preis” of the SKE and the “Förderungspreis of the City of Vienna“, the “Queen Marie José International Composition Prize”, the “Staats” stipend of the Federal Chancellery for the Arts, a working stipend at the “Akademie Schloss Solitude” the “Erste Bank Kompositionspreis“ as well as other prizes.
About Ictus
Ictus is a Brussels-based contemporary music ensemble. The ensemble examines formats and ways of listening: very short or very long concerts, mystery programmes, guided concerts. Ictus has shared, and sometimes amplified, current questions about the future of contemporary music. Initially led by conductor Georges-Elie Octors, Ictus mutated into an “electric orchestra” and hired, for example, a regular sound engineer as an instrumentalist. It then became a multifaceted collective of creative musicians, dedicated to experimental music in the broadest sense. Ictus is conducting an advanced Master’s programme that focuses on contemporary music interpretation, in collaboration with the Ghent School of Arts.