Mourning in a language isolate no one remembers how to speak, separated from our collective traumas by the abyss of four millennia. Poetry emerging from a human-machine hybrid duet.

This project of assemblages is based on the creative interpretation of fragments of the ancient Sumerian text Lament Over the Destruction of Ur. The literary text represents the genre of the so called city lament, which emerged during the fall of the Sumerian city-states around 2000 BC, in the times of wars and fundamental changes of the existing social and political order. It is a lamentation performed by the tutelary goddess Ningal weeping for her city that she failed to protect from utter destruction. The act of lamenting becomes a ritual of passage, a process of coming to terms with unimaginable tragedy through recognizing the trauma and describing the mourning.

Rituals of passage related to death, dying, and loss take various forms in different cultures. They consist, for example, of singing, recitation, screaming, loud crying, but also noise, even laughter, rhythmic patterns and intensification of sounds, and on the other hand their passage to ritually maintained silence. In anthropological approaches to the ritual, its transformative and therapeutic power is often emphasized. The important role of sounds comes from their physicality and materiality, which literally permeates the space and touches the bodies of the participants of the ritual.

The sound material for this project was created through collaboration between composer Ewa Trębacz and cultural anthropologist Anna Niedźwiedź (voice, improvisation, references to ethnography and cultural anthropology). The process was based

on the free exploration of the literary text in its original language through a series of recordings sessions. The resulting interpretation was based on both anthropological knowledge of mourning rituals and on subjective, emotional responses to the Sumerian text and attempts to decipher it sonically. It became a peculiar kind of archaeology of the literary text, by embodying and enlivening it with voice and with the physical interactions with space. The sound recordings were made in Poland and the United States (with the participation of French horn player Josiah Boothby) and became the foundation for the series of assemblages – hybrid sonic and audiovisual forms. The hybridization of the source sound material was achieved by the composer through fragmentation and re-composition of the human voice and its interactions with computer generated speech, incorporating accents from various modern languages. The vocal and instrumental parts were derived directly from this material. During the concert performance they will be brought to life by the musicians and recalled in the physical space here and now. The visual layer is intended to be an intermediate form allowing for an understanding of the literary context through graphics and text directly corresponding to the sound layer (the original text and its contemporary counterpoint generated using natural language processing algorithms).

Assemblages: fluid, accidental, unique moments in time.

The concept of assemblage is related to the interpretation of reality through the category of momentarily created and unique systems, which in turn create and generate something new themselves, but basically they are ephemeral, fluid, a bit accidental and unique. Assemblages go beyond the anthropocentric perception of reality and emphasize the relationality of people, animals, bodies, space, plants, objects, various matter and its various textures, machines and technologies, etc., and indicate a turn towards interaction and broadly understood ecology.

Ewa Trębacz

The lament for Urim (Ur)

[39–40]
O city, the lament is bitter, the lament made for you.
Your lament is bitter, o city, the lament made for you.

[85–100A]
The woman, after she had composed her song for the tearful balaĝ instrument,
herself utters softly a lamentation for the silent house:
[…]
The bitter storm having come to be for me during the day,
I trembled on account of that day
but I did not flee
before the day’s violence.
[…]
The bitter lament having come to be for me during the night,
I trembled on account of that night
but I did not flee
before the night’s violence.

The awesomeness of this storm, destructive as the flood,
truly hangs heavy on me.

Because of its existence,
in my nightly sleeping place,
even in my nightly sleeping place
truly there was no peace for me.

Nor, because of this debilitating storm,
was the quiet of my sleeping place,
not even the quiet of my sleeping place,
allowed to me.
[…]

[136–143]
On that day, when such a storm had pounded, […]
On that day, when such a storm had been created.
When they had pronounced the utter destruction of my city, […]
When they had directed that its people be killed,
On that day
I did not abandon my city,
I did not forsake my land.

Source: J.A. Black, G. Cunningham, J. Ebeling, E. Flückiger-Hawker, E. Robson, J. Taylor, G. Zólyomi, The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Oxford 1998–2006, http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/