Voice artist, composer and radio maker, Rwandan-Belgian artist Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman is it all. She focuses emphatically on her personal field recordings: a large collection of unique sounds and soundscapes of rural and urban contemporary East Africa. In her work, she fuses voice art, audio art and contemporary composition in a very personal way.
In Umva!, Lierman further breaks open the boundaries between radio art and storytelling. Listeners are each given wireless headphones at the start of the performance and immersed in a hybrid sound world that unfolds from the connection between instrumental and vocal music, bruitage, Afrique concrète and abstract electronics.
For Umva! (meaning ‘listening’), Lierman – born in Rwanda but raised in Belgium – draws direct inspiration from a series of life-changing encounters with Kanyoni Ladislas, her 113-year-old Rwandan grandfather. Lierman considers him a legend: during his long life as a hunter and traditional healer, he witnessed how colonisation, the struggle for independence, genocides and post-war conflicts transformed Rwanda into the fragile country it is today. She last visited him in 2021, in the Virunga, where she also discovered another impressive part of his life: him, in his younger years, as a master of cows, leading large herds throughout the region of Lierman’s ancestors. This – together with his already exceptional work as a healer and hunter – gave him an even more unique position in Rwanda’s (pre-colonial) society. Through her grandfather, Lierman gained access to the beauty of the inyambo cow and the sophisticated complexity of Rwanda’s underexposed ancient esoteric cow cult.
Umva! shows the outcome of Lierman’s research into forms of animism, the belief in a complete, animated world, and the ways in which animistic worldviews have managed to survive despite fierce oppression through heavy colonisation.
Composition: Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman – Musical dramaturgy: Romain Bischoff – Performers: Soa Ratsifandrihana, Raphaela Danksagmüller, Maya Felixbrodt, Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman, Yung-Tuan Ku and Kaito Winse – Light technician: Niels Kingma – Sound technician: Stefan Bos
Umva! is a concept by Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman and production by Diogo Marques.
As part of Sounds Now, co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme.
