Discussing Music & Politics by Albane Tamagna
Albane Tamagna is a Mediterranean flutist and performer based in Marseille. She is a member of Ensemble Hopper, a Belgian collective with a flexible lineup at the avant-garde of European musical creation. Les Gens qui Partent, a sound performance dedicated to identities shaped by displacement, is her first solo project.
When I was about 28, I started to realize that everything we do –or even everything we are– is political. I decided I had to make some choices that were more coherent with my values and asked myself how it could be possible to bring this commitment on stage. Choosing female composers was one of my first thoughts, and the very “air du temps” kind of commitment. For me, it wasn’t only this. I mean, it’s very important and I would even say, it’s crucial to play more female composers but my point was more to bring the audience to introspection, and I really wanted people to go back home after one of my shows with questions, discussions between them, maybe even arguments or debates. Something which could penetrate their soul and accompany them during their insights or their dreams.
To begin this new artist posture, I preferred starting with a topic that I am familiar with and have been dealing with for many years: identities.
If I am really sincere, I think it was also a good way to figure out all the questions I had inside myself regarding my strong feelings of uprooting. I suppose I was looking for answers and appeasement, and bringing this show to life was my resilience. Be that as it may, when I started working on what the show would look like I was not aware of what these artistic challenges would provoque, I just tried to put all my creativity into this very area: how to question people about their own identity using sounds. I was sure of the question I wanted to ask, but can we be sure of the way the audience would receive it, especially with abstract art? As an artist, we don’t have hands on what kind of reaction audiences could have, what message they would bring back home, but we must put all our artistic techniques and convictions into our creations, constantly going back and forth in our minds, wondering how the audience might react to or receive each passage. But at the end, we must accept that this belongs to them. Do your part as an artist and the audience will do theirs, maybe.
In the first place, I decided to define the dramaturgy and make some “collage” of different music above it. The story will guide the choices of sounds. The line is very simple: we follow steps of someone’s departure, from their place of birth, the trip and the new place of arrival. At the same time, I had this major crush on one piece of Wilfrido Terrazas -Itaca, viaje para un flautista- which retraces the Odyssey, and I could imagine these nine movements would help me to organize my performance. The greatest myth of the eternal (non-?)return, of aimless movement, of where is home, would support the actual stories of migration. During the whole path the music illustrates the emotions we go through. Rapidly, two different realities imposed themselves on me: I had to start the story speaking of myself and opening to the general idea and I couldn’t carry this message alone. At this moment the performance starts to emerge in the form we know now: we tell a story about leaving a place, all the emotions one must experience, whether by choice or by force, starting with my personal history which then opens to all migration stories. This is also the moment when Sami Tedeschi and Gilles Doneux came on board, since I had to admit that I couldn’t construct this all by myself. To be able to have all the subtilities of this very touchy subject I had to expand the setup. I decided to integrate recorded testimonies of people who wanted to share their own experience of migration. Sami is a sound documentarian who oversees field and voice recordings. We chose together which sentences we were going to keep regarding the places we wanted to put in and what message we wanted to highlight.
Thus, the sound material takes its final form: music, field recordings of environments that serve the purpose and voices of strangers. Gilles worked for that. He is a sound designer and responsible for creating the spaces between the different blocks to unify everything. To perfect the whole experience and create a show lasting about fifty minutes, I have composed two pieces (A Mare & Fille de Circe), Gilles has composed two as well (Pattern & Prepattern), and I also reached out to François Couvreur for a score (Sable Music).
Allowing these stories to be heard, I can now bring the complexity of each emotion through everyone’s diversity.
The performance is expected to evolve continuously since we are recording on every territory where we are going. The next step is the invitation we received from the University of California – San Diego. The goal here is to connect with people on both sides of the US-Mexico border to see how migration experiences here can reflect the ones in the Mediterranean Sea – where we came from. We have turned seas and oceans into borders, as well as deserts and mountains, forgetting that these liminal spaces are defined by their biodiversity, their nature and the identities of people who live there. We have decided to build walls separating certain areas, by doing so forcing and establishing multiple self-proclaimed identities: so-called “differences” on either side of the separation line, a concrete stop for those who just want to pass by, and we changed the very nature of these areas, converting them into convergence points of containment policies and for far too many of them, into kill zones.
I still carry these reflexions with me today, and now as we are about to cross the most deadly border on Earth, I can't help but remain vigilant about other topics. We need to be certain to carry multiple stories (and probably the heaviest ones) without taking ownership of them, nor instrumentalizing the pain of others. Furthermore, we must always pay attention to keep the strong and vivid expressions to avoid the temptation of the literal.
I hope that questioning people about something so deeply inside them will break some walls, not the real ones but some in our minds. I know that other audiences and places will give rise to new questions and reflections, and that I will continue to grow along with my show.
Albane Tamagna
You can follow the evolution of the show on Albane Tamagna Instagram account and on her website. Next dates are:
Border Tour US/MEX
27th November • 07:00 pm – Semana Internacional de Improvisacion - Centro Estatal de las Artes – Ensenada
4th December • 07:00 pm - Conrad Prebys Experimental Theater – UC San Diego
You can watch the UCSD show on live streaming 07:00 PM Pacific Time
5th December • 06:00 pm - Fronte Arte y Cultura Gallery – San Isidro
6th December • 07:00 pm - Center on Global Justice – Tijuana
In Europe
30th January 2025 • 08:00 pm – Festival Loop – Senghor - Bruxelles