at last year’s Warsaw Autumn, six women composers and five women performers presented a project titled Feminine Forms, which restored the missing or repressed feminine element in music. This process is continued this year by three female and three male composers as well as five female performers. 

Femininity has advanced forward, expressing anger, regaining independence, and looking for new ways of expression and being in the world. Anger is a strong emotion. Its greatest advantage is that it breaks away from the status quo, thus creating a gap which new forms can enter. In order to discover those forms, to attain a new balance, the other party needs to respond. It is only such a response that can trigger the process of going beyond the familiar and safe in search of real and fundamental changes. 

In the opening of her novel The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson refers to the famous paradox of the ship of Theseus, whose parts were systematically exchanged during the voyage by the Athenian sailors but, though its construction changed completely many times and old boards were being replaced over time, the name remained unchanged: Argo. Just so, “whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use, as ‘the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new,’” says Nelson, quoting Roland Barthes. 

The project’s female and male authors plunge into the chaos of the unnamed in order to create a joint work in a collective experimental process. is work will be signed with all their names on a par and none of them separately. They undertake the risk of venturing into the unknown territories. They explore new forms of collaboration and co-creation as well as facing up to the dangers involved, in search of a new extraordinary language of longlost balance. 

Hubert Sulima