Răsărituri în formare

Mădălina Ciocanu

— Installation
Thursday, 24 Sept 19:00 — Sunday, 4 Oct / MX

a răsări > to sprout, to arise răsărită > sunflower seeds răsărit > sunrise (plural. răsărituri)

răsărituri în formare begins with a familiar ritual in Moldova: sitting together over a handful of sunflower seeds (răsărită) and spending time shelling them (a dezghioca). The work brings together testimonies and fragments of conversations held within this setting, where the repetitive gesture of shelling creates a different rhythm of speaking and listening. The sound piece unfolds in two movements. The first stays close to things that do not easily come apart: tensions, sighs, “sins,” troubled memories, “I don’t knows,” and questions without answers. Shelling (dezghiocarea) becomes a method of staying with the unknown, of slowly grinding through things that have hardened, without the obligation to clarify or resolve them. The voices remain intentionally only partially intelligible: some testimonies are too intimate to become public information, while what remains unheard creates space for listeners to enter with their own questions and fears. Conversation, too, must occasionally stop — “so you don’t get a blister on your tongue” — and in these intervals, the seeds take over as the carriers of meaning. Street corners where words have been exchanged become material testimonies to these encounters: traces of places where information has been spoken, listened to, ground down, and re-formed.

Within the context of the Truths in motion residency and its engagement with disinformation, the work proposes a shift away from the impulse to capture information and assign it a stable, static, and unidirectional form (from sender to receiver), towards information as a relational process, permanently in formation. Here, in/dis/formation takes place through memory, omission, repetition, intimacy, materiality, and transformation. The second movement of the piece begins to emerge and sprout (a răsări) from this uncertainty: fragments of clarity, encouragement, and blessings appear as possibilities for repair and for germinating in other directions.

Visitors are invited to enter the same process: to take a seat, to deshell, to listen, and to allow their own questions to be ground and worked through alongside those they hear.

Mădălina Ciocanu works with sound, education, ethnography, research, and and and… She re/searches transdisciplinarity at Columbia University and makes and mixes music under the secret stage name DJ BORȘ. She plays around with sound, inquiring into the collectivity and materialism of “producing”-composing-creating, and hosted the workshop “Ciulește Urechile”, based on deep listening. Mădălina was born in Chișinău and has spent the past 15 years in the Americas, with a recent comeback in this hemisphere. Her ethical focus is on dialogical pluriversality.

The work was developed as part of the Truths in motion sound art residency, a Franco-German cultural cooperation project supported by the Franco-German Cultural Fund and organized by the French Institute in Romania and Goethe-Institut Moldova, in collaboration with the SIMULTAN Festival.