Olga Nefedova
A live sound performance combining voice, a no-input mixer, and an analog synthesizer to evoke stories from a fragmented world. The project draws inspiration from Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter, a collection of translations of the surviving fragments of Sappho’s poetry.
What is truly passed in translation? From language to language, from one person’s mind to another’s, from medium to medium. What if the message reaches the other side as a scatter of fragments, reconstituted into a new whole upon arrival?
The project draws on Anne Carson’s translations of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, where nearly empty pages hold just one to several words. Unrestored into full utterances, the text lays bare its losses: the worn patches and tears of the papyrus, scraps of citations in other authors’ texts.
Olga turns to this poetics of translation in search of a musical language of fragmentation. Local sound, silence, instruments of limited frequency and dynamic range attune to the ruptures and misalignments between layers of reality.
Voice, no-input mixer, and a system of feedback become a polyphonic chimera that echoes the words of one who once felt inspiration, confusion, vulnerability, and tenderness; one who walked, inward, through prickling grass.
* ‘If not, winter’ is the title of Anne Carson’s book of translations of Sappho.
Artistic Guidance: Kiki Keren Huss, Amir Boltzmann, Anna Wild.
Installation Support: Michael Marushkin
Creative Consultation: Yifat Ziv, Eilon Cohen, Daniil Koronkevich.
