Parasite Village

Let’s figure out
Ways to hope
Ways to love

We are living in one of the greatest species extinctions in history. But not only species, also sounds, languages and music are disappearing. The project “EXT INC / REMEMBER ME” of the transtraditional concert series “Outernational” traces these processes together with the composers Aida Shirazi and Emre Dündar and two world premieres. Emre Dündar has written a «Fakelore» that approaches various folklore traditions of the Turkish-Greek region. The young Iranian composer Aida Shirazi opens the evening with a solo performance for crickets and electronics and refers in her composition to Walt Whitman’s «This Compost» – a text that evokes the living in the acceptance of death. With Vivaldi’s «La Folia» – a motif composed many times in music history – the evening hovers over the abyss of history before ending in hope with the second part of Aida Shirazi’s new composition.

“When we think about the future, we should start from the feelings. Feelings are from the future. (…) If I listen to music today that moves me at my core, tomorrow I may have empathy for a seabird or a hedgehog in the garden. Empathy is the first step in feeling connected to other, non-human things.”
Timothy Morton in VAN Outernational

The evening will be introduced by an “Outernational Listening Session”, for which the philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber has written an essay on the topic, which will be heard for the first time in a sound space by Kirsten Reese. Weber himself writes:

“If butterflies are the crystallized form of the inner feeling that fills the world, then they will go away if we deny that this feeling exists. The denial of soul is the most tragic mistake of Western civilization.” Andreas Weber