Aliaskar Abarkas
The Community Whistling Choir – Sound Installation
The results of the workshop, The Community Whistling Choir, led by artist Aliakar Abarkas in June 2024 at Biblioteca Casanatense, will be presented in the form of a sound installation on 6 and 7 September as part of the Short Theatre 2024 program at Mattatoio in Rome.
The workshop focused on the library’s largely understudied collection of Persian and Arab manuscripts, dating back as early as the sixteenth century. Through the study of the volumes, Abarkas and the participants practiced a series of vocal, breathing and collective physical improvisation exercises, to develop and interpret—through the bodily instrument of the whistle—an imaginary language meant to create a dialogue between their bodies, the spaces of the library and the visible and invisible entities that inhabit it, thus shaping the base for a musical composition.
By Whom It Was Heard, I Don’t Know, the title of the track presented in the sound installation at Short Theatre, draws from the recordings made during the workshop as well as fragments from the artist’s archive, suggests the extreme contingency and physical uncontainability of sound.
