drifting a line from Lausanne to İzmir

Reaching out to friends and contacts with knowledge of Jewish (especially Sephardic) history in relation to Italy (Liguria, Tuscany coast, Napoli, Puglia), Patras area, Athens, Thessaloniki, Samos island, Mycale Straits, Kuşadası, Istanbul, Sofia…
We will soon be drifting a line from Lausanne to İzmir, tracing 500 years of Sephardic routes and the fade-out of a language, a century of ‘Turkey Turkish’, of ‘The Waste Land’ and of divergent and criss-crossing migratory routes, invasions, expulsions, ‘push-backs’, exterminations, survivals…

Since 2018 we have developed a practice of journeying, drifting, observing, engaging and picking up voices and sounds, all the while playing back and forth along a spectrum of intentionality and control; at times understanding what’s happening and knowing where we are, at others getting lost, getting it wrong and not knowing, while deferring knowledge to others, trusting strangers to guide or mould us. The performance work we make as a result of these trips aims to consolidate such spectrums through craft that takes time – for example, for Mund-Stück, we slowly learnt by heart what people said to us in a language we didn’t understand (German), eventually revoicing it verbatim and in sync with each other, on stage.

Voices will remain our material, but this time the work will be to sew a Sebaldian story-map with the multicoloured and trans-lingual threads of place, history, people and the language they speak or spoke.

If any of the subjects mentioned above strikes some kind of chord with your own knowledge, history, connections or interests, please be in touch – we’d love to talk and maybe come and meet you on our way (29 April – 20 June)

ps our soundtrack is probably something between
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW0avFq-wH8
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9gtaI4ya5Q

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This continuation of the Mouth Piece project is made possible thanks to a precious collaboration with Buse Yildrim and her team at Beykoz Kundura.