site Yizkor project
june 17, 2022
21:30
performance
Site: Yizkor is an interdisciplinary project created collaboratively by Maya Ciarrocchi and Andrew Conklin that documents manifestations of loss through text, video, and music. The work exists in three modes of presentation, allowing audiences and viewers alternative forms of engagement. Site: Yizkor is an autonomous video/sound installation, an evening-length musical performance in an immersive projected environment, and a workshop where participants create Yizkor* pages to mourn and commemorate lost people and places.
In 2022 Ciarrocchi and Conklin, along with a team of American and Polish musicians, will perform the work at the Sichów Educational Foundation, an education and research center in Sichów Duży, Poland, and at the Róża Centre for International and Interdisciplinary Art and Cooperation in Ruszcza, Poland. Both locations are historical sites once belonging to aristocratic Polish families. The properties fell into ruin in the aftermath of WWII, and their restoration is ongoing. Performances of Site: Yizkor will be site-specific, with musicians, singers, and dancers performing inside the buildings surrounded by video projected onto the architectural surfaces. Ciarrocchi will offer Yizkor writing workshops to the area residents and invite them to read their writing during the performance.
* Memorial books written by survivors of the Holocaust to commemorate people and places destroyed during World War II.
artists
Maya Ciarrocchi
Maya Ciarrocchi is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist working across media in drawing, printmaking, performance, video, and social practice. Her projects excavate disappeared histories as in her current work Site: Yizkor, where architectural renderings of destroyed buildings, maps of vanished places, extant Yizkor books, and viewer contributed writing become sources for documenting manifestations of loss. Ciarrocchi investigates how displacement writes itself into generational consciousness through the layering of architecture, maps, and memory in this work. The resulting compositions construct new, fantastical spaces that offer possibilities for healing and remembrance. Ciarrocchi has exhibited her work in such New York venues as Abrons Arts Center, Anthology Film Archives, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Chocolate Factory, Equity Gallery, Kinescope Gallery, Microscope Gallery, and Smack Mellon, among others, and at Artisphere, (VA), Hammer Museum (CA), Borderlines Film Festival (UK), Moving Pictures Festival (CAN). She has received residencies and fellowships from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Bronx Museum of the Arts (AIM), LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Process Space, Swing Space), MacDowell, Millay Arts, New York Artists Equity, UCross, and Wave Hill (Winter Workspace). She has received funding from foundations such as Bay and Paul, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation, Mertz Gilmore, and project grants from Franklin Furnace Fund and MAP Fund. Ciarrocchi received a 2020 BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts and a 2021 Trust for Mutual Understanding grant to bring Site: Yizkor to Poland. Ciarrocchi earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, and a BFA from SUNY Purchase, Purchase, NY.
Andrew Conklin
is a composer, songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who makes music that engages with American vernacular idioms and contemporary classical practices. He has appeared as a composer or performer throughout the United States and Europe, and his music has garnered recognition from diverse voices spanning the worlds of popular and classical music. Andrew's work has received critical acclaim in blogs such as Pitchfork and The Line of Best Fit, and has been supported by grants from organizations including the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Vox Novus. His first full-length album, If I Were More Like You, was praised in Filter Magazine as "one of the best collections of songs I've had the pleasure of being exposed to, ever." Andrew was a 2018 Fellow at the Millay Arts, where he worked on a large-scale composition project based on Northern California folk music from the late 1930s. Two pieces in this cycle, Field Reports and Song Collector, were released in 2019 and 2020 on New Focus Recordings and Bot Cave Records, respectively. A versatile musical collaborator, Andrew earned a 2017 Grammy nomination for Best Bluegrass Recording for his contributions to The Hazel and Alice Sessions (Spruce and Maple Music) as a core band member of Laurie Lewis & The Right Hands. Andrew’s guitar and bass playing can be heard on record labels such as Six Degrees, Spruce and Maple, Plug Research, City Slang, BAG Productions, and Arhoolie, and he has recently contributed as a guitarist to recordings by Ben Goldberg, Meklit Hadero, and Michael Rocketship. He has also toured extensively in the United States and Europe as a guitarist and bassist with indie rock bands (Chris Cohen), bluegrass groups (Laurie Lewis), and improvising combos (Timosaurus). As a composer, Andrew has enjoyed fruitful partnerships with musicians from some of today's most inquisitive new music ensembles, including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Ensemble Mise-En, Spektral Quartet, Ensemble Connect, Tala Rasa Percussion, the Calidore String Quartet, and Earplay. Andrew also spends time thinking and writing about music theory, composition, and the pedagogy of music theory and composition. He has published articles and presented papers on these topics in Music Theory Online, NewMusicBox, Pedagogy into Practice, and the Society of Composers National Conference. Andrew previously held teaching positions at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and Stony Brook University before joining University of the Pacific in 2018, where he currently directs the composition and music theory program.
Ben Goldberg
Beginning in 1992, when his group New Klezmer Trio “kicked open the door for radical experiments with Ashkenazi roots music” (SF Chronicle), clarinetist Ben Goldberg has established himself as “one of the most vibrant, flexible, and inventive clarinetists in jazz and improvised music” (Downbeat), “an artist who seems to find beautiful melodies at the end of every path.” (NPR). Through his many bands and compositional projects The New York Times has noted Ben’s music for “a feeling of joyous research into the basics of polyphony and collective improvising,” and he was named #1 Rising Star Clarinetist in the Downbeat Critics Poll in both 2011 and 2013. In 2015 Ben released Orphic Machine, a song-cycle with lyrics from the “speculative poetics” of Allen Grossman, performed by a nine piece ensemble including Nels Cline, Ron Miles, Myra Melford, and Ches Smith, and sung by violinist Carla Kihlstedt. The LA Times called Orphic Machine “knotted and occasionally spooky composition marked by dazzling interplay.”
Ben leads or co-leads The Out Louds, Invisible Guy, Unfold Ordinary Mind; Go Home, “a searching ensemble that welcomes lyrical improvisation while embracing the groove” (The New Yorker); Ben Goldberg School; and Ben Goldberg Trio with Greg Cohen and Kenny Wollesen. He is a member of the avant-chamber jazz ensemble Tin Hat; and performs in a duo with pianist Myra Melford called DIALOGUE. Other affiliations include plays monk; Myra Melford’s Be Bread; Kris Davis’ Infrasound; Nels Cline’s New Monastery; Todd Sickafoose’s Tiny Resistors; Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom; and Clarinet Thing. The 11- piece Ben Goldberg’s Brainchild performs Ben’s on-the-spot compositions.
Jon Arkin
As an artist, Jon Arkin does not fall neatly into one tidy category, genre, or medium, yet his work can always be relied upon to exhibit certain qualities: uniqueness, balance, and inspiration. He is known & sought-after as a drummer, composer, and digital media wrangler. Arkin’s latest projects incorporate his self-designed hybrid electro-acoustic setup, which blends a vast palate of digital textures with organic sound. Drawing upon his extensive background as a tinkerer, hacker, and an aficionado of all styles of music, his work brings a multitude of elements together within the contexts of traditional composition, spontaneous composition, and algorithmic indeterminacy. He can be seen & heard using this setup with the Schimscheimer Family Trio (with saxophonist Kasey Knudsen and keyboardist Michael Coleman), with clarinetist Ben Goldberg (as a duo, and in other Goldberg projects), as a solo performer, and in collaboration with various other artists. In addition to leading his own groups, he has performed around the U.S. and internationally with jazz greats such as Lee Konitz, Gene Perla, and Ira Sullivan, with singer-songwriters including Vusi Mahlasela, Stew, and Meklit Hadero, Afrobeat bands Albino and Soji Odukogbe, folk musicians Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and John Doe, a multitude of experimental/new music collaborators including Nathan Clevenger, Jordan Glenn, Cuong Vu, and MoeTar, as well as countless other musicians. Spanning three decades, his list of recording credits includes dozens of albums and guest appearances in a wide variety of genres, as he maintains an active recording schedule as a studio musician.
Joanna Duda
Morris Kliphius
Berlin-based, Dutch composer/instrumentalist Morris Kliphuis (born 1986) is a singular talent, whose work is as impressive as it is difficult to pigeonhole.“Everything I do tends to be between genres,” he says. In recent years, he has been busy writing for ensembles, soloists and vocalists – often from classical backgrounds – all of whom are equally committed to blurring genres in search of something truly new.“A key part of my working process is that I include the performer in my creative process, so that my work is collaborative and there is a sense of shared ownership,” says Kliphuis.“This makes things more interesting for everyone.” The Secret Diary of Nora Plain, which premiered in 2017, is a prime example.Written for singer Nora Fischer, the Ragazze Quartet and Remco Menting, with texts by Lucky Fonz III, it features Kliphuis’s daring arrangements: gauzy, featherweight dream vistas, spiky art-rock- classical stylings, gossamer translucencies and avant-folk dance themes all vie for attention in this extraordinary work, described by The New York Times as “a haunting cycle.” Also in 2017, Kliphuis was commissioned by the North Sea Jazz Festival to create fresh work – leading to the founding of DIMLICHT, a new group bringing together musicians with backgrounds in both pop and free improvisation. Hailed by NRC Handelsblad as a set that “threw the doors wide open,” Kliphuis’s groundbreaking compositions combined written scores, improvisation and electronics to create a thrillingly unpredictable stew. It should come as no surprise that Kliphuis is every bit as iconoclastic and boundary breaking as an instrumentalist as well.A virtuoso on the French horn – an instrument strongly associated with classical orchestral music – Kliphuis is one of the few players in the world dedicated to exploring its potential in improvised, experimental and cross-genre settings. “I have a strong interest in expanding the range of possibilities of the horn,” he says. Kliphuis first rose to fame as founder member of the award-winning trio Kapok, which mixed elements of punk, rock and free improvisation. During the seven years of the group’s existence, from 2012 to 2019, they released four critically acclaimed albums that blended virtuosity, spontaneity and unbridled energy. In later years, they gravitated even closer to free improvisation, using synthesizers and live processing to create what Jazzenzo called “mysterious, provocative sound worlds. Now, as a solo artist, Kliphuis is pushing this aesthetic even further, while taking the French horn in even more unexpected directions. Using electronics, effects pedals and extended instrumental techniques, Kliphuis sketches misty soundscapes of soft, spacious tones, seeded with dark, expressive flourishes – in a sense doing for the French horn what Arve Henriksen has done for the trumpet. In 2021, Kliphuis will present his most ambitious work to date – a new solo project combining French horn and electronics.“I am convinced that the boundaries of style and genre will continue to shift and dissolve,” he says,“and that this creates fascinating opportunities waiting to be explored.”
performing with
Alexandrov Krilil
A tanned artist straight from Mariupol. I danced on the streets of such cities as: Yalta, Donetsk, Kyiv, Odessa, Paris, Barcelona. I have been creating in Poland since 2013, working with improvisation and performance art, acting in an independent theater Scena Supernova, making videos, street art, stream art. I make perfauvideophotogenerative blends and I love my body and its intelligence.
Katarzyna Pastuszak
Kateryna Radchenko
Curator, artist and photography researcher. Since 2015 she acts as the founder and director of the international festival Odesa Photo Days. Additionally, since 2009 she is the head of the NGO “Art Travel”. Kateryna has curated exhibitions in Ukraine, South Korea, Sweden, Georgia, France, Canada, Greece, UK, Austria, Denmark and Latvia.As an author, she has published articles in several international magazines and online platforms, such as Fotograf, Magenta, EIKON, The British Journal of Photography, FOAM Magazines. Kateryna studied photography during the fellowship program at Villa Arson (Nice, France), Gaude Polonia program (Warsaw, Poland), Museum of Photography (San Diego, USA).
Małgorzata Haduch
Maya Gelfman
Natalia Chylińska
Roie Avidan
Sarah Turquety
media
partners
Sichow Educational Foundation and Trust for
Mutual Understanding