Chant & Voix tout autour de la mort
Lecture
During the creative process for the performance L'Enveillée, Juliette Kempf and the artistic team conducted research on funeral songs that accompany or have accompanied rituals around the world, notably in partnership with the Geneva Museum of Ethnography and during a trip to Madagascar. In this talk, she shares the reflections that emerged from this research and from listening to funeral songs. This is a talk given as an artist, not as a scientist. Through these songs, we ask ourselves: How do they affect us, and how do they resonate with our own relationship to death? And how, in particular, do lamentations—the sung expression of grief—or even the involvement of professional mourners during certain stages of mourning, challenge our understanding?
© Franco Pinna
related works and publications
Yes, it was an encounter with Madagascar that took place. Three and a half weeks is not much time in such a rich land—just as it would have been in any new land. But the encounter, though brief, was intense, beautiful, stirring, and instructive. We were able to have two major experiences, and it is these that I will try to tell you about. Each of these experiences unfolded through several encounters. The first was witnessing the famadihana ritual in the Highlands, generally translated as “turning of the dead.” The second was getting up close and personal with traditional …
Had we forgotten that we knew nothing? Had we forgotten the moment of the great unknown—the one that awaits us all, each and every one of us, whose approaching blows we macabrely count down each evening? Certainly not; how could we forget that we are welcomed here, on this Earth, our sister, only temporarily? How could we forget that the pact—the only one that matters—has been clear from the beginning, from the moment of our arrival: there will be a departure.
