Arachnesound Agf & Various

Wednesday, February 17 | Onassis Channel on YouTube

“Don’t give up fighting because the struggle is not over; it has just begun.” – Marianna Karakoulaki, 2016

A music project commissioned by Onassis Stegi, an audio collection created by the experimental sound artist AGF in collaboration with Greek women sound artists, singers and poetesses, an animated film by Andreas Karaoulanis which accompanies the music, an homage to the greek female poets from ancient times to nowadays. Sound and remembering in Arachnesound from February 17. Get caught in this unique project’s web, to be made available on the Onassis Channel on YouTube .

Arachnesound is feminist sonic technology. It stands for the principles of women-weaving-futures, network building, sonic cyberfeminist attempts to retell historical narratives. Arachnesound is an audio collection with 36 compositions around Greek language, sound and feminisms. It is centered around women writers, poetesses and mythologies to interpret women’s lives and realities with radical composition. Field recordings, electro-acoustic, electronic, digital processing, voices are the ingredient of these pieces. International artist Andreas Karaoulanis breathes additional life into this extraordinary project through a series of animations made specially to accompany each piece of music.

Thirty-six pieces of music, written for both celebrated and unsung heroines: from Arachne to Cassandra, from Sappho to Lena Platonos, from the first feminist – Hipparchia – to Cassia, from Kallirhoe Parren to Raika, from Maria Polydouri and Melpo Axioti to Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Katerina Gogou. As noted by AGF: “I am fascinated with how men managed to get rid of all the goddesses in our minds. I am atheist, obviously raised Marxist, but my main question is how due so many people subdue to a patriarchal mono-god type concepts”.

In the included commissioned essay, Angela Dimitrakaki writes: arachnesound “... is a creative counter-archive of resurrected names and of works by contemporary Greek women poets, or whose words are interpreted poetically.”

AGF collaborates with Greek women composers, producers and writers such as Savina Yannatou, Angela Dimitrakaki, Anna Stereopoulou, Dr Maria Papadomanolaki, Maria Arapoglou, Linda Reine Nyongo, Dimitra Ioannou, Konstantina Korryvanti, Ismini Samanidou, Nicoleta Chatzopoulou, Marianna Karakoulaki and Chritina Pitouli to complete the collection. It is AGF’s 5th audio collection of that kind following a German (2010), Finnish (2013), Japanese (2015) and Russian (2019) compilation. Remembering and sound.

As Christos Carras, the Music Program Curator and Executive Director of Onassis Stegi, comments “The first collaboration between AGF and Onassis Stegi was in the theater of Ancient Messene, where she performed in the context of Tuned City. When AGF proposed the Arachnesound project to Onassis Stegi, it immediately resonated with our interests, because through time language has similarly been a medium of exclusion. Just as we wanted, with Tuned City project in Ancient Messene, to re-read an ancient site of political power through a contemporary sonic thinking, it was clear the linguistic heritage of Greece, of which as a culture we are so proud, also needs to be read and heard differently. Because, through the long heritage of the Greek language the narratives that have emerged until comparatively recently have been dominated by male visions and subjectivities. So, especially in a year of usually uncritical celebration of the founding myths of the modern Greek nation, it seemed important to weave a history of women’s words.”

Discover Arachnesound’s research and creative process via the artist’s personal diary, available here.

CREDITS

A work by AGF (aka Antye Greie) with Reine Linda Nyongo, Savina Yannatou, Angela Dimitrakaki, Anna Stereopoulou, Maria Papadomanolaki, Maria Arapoglou, Nicoleta Chatzopoulou, Dimitra Ioannou, Katerina Iliopoulou, Konstantina Korryvanti, Ismini Samanidou, Carsten Stabenow

Animation: Andreas Karaoulanis (bestbefore)

Onassis Stegi

Christos Carras, Music Program Curator

Christina Pitouli, Producer

Arachnesound will remain available at Onassis Channel on Youtube, free of charge and with no time limit.

AGF

Antye Greie-Ripatti is a digital songwriter, sound artist & curator, composer, poet, feminist, activist. She is also known as AGF, Laub, and poemproducer. Born in 1969, and raised in East Germany, she has lived and worked in Hailuoto, Finland since 2008. She works with language, sound, listening, voice, and communication, expressed in mixed media, audiovisual live performances, digital communication, sound installations, commissions for radio, movies and theater, exhibitions and conceptual works. Greie-Ripatti has released 30 long player records, and has been engaged in numerous collaborations under such aliases as AGF, AGF/Delay (with Vladislav Delay), Greie Gut Fraktion (with Gudrun Gut), and The Lappetites (with Kaffe Matthews and Eliane Radigue), among them – for a long term – with the award-winning classical composer Craig Armstrong. She runs the production company and music label AGF Producktion and has produced records for other artists, most famously for Ellen Allien (Sool, 2009, BPitch). In 2011, Greie-Ripatti founded the arts organization Hai Art in Hailuoto, where she serves as artistic director, executive producer, and workshop leader. Hai Art has organized a conference on remote art, more than ten artist-in-residencies, extensive sound program with children in Hailuoto, the iPad Orchestra Hailuoto, the Organum, the Hailuoto (mini) MediaLAB, and numerous artists camps. Since 2011 she works as independent sound curator.