THE REVENGE OF THE SNAKE WOMAN. A SOUNDCOMIC FOR UNICA ZÜRN (2020) BY NATASCHA GANGL & RDEČA RAKETA (MAJA OSOJNIK & MATIJA SCHELLANDER)
LIMITED EDITIONS:
I, II, III / 1-6 (18 PIECES / WHITE LINO PRINT OVER CYANOTYPE
IV / 13 PIECES / WHITE & RED LINO PRINT
Artwork: Maja Osojnik
Artwork material: Collage (graphics, drawings, photography on transparent sheets for the Cyanotype, Lino Print, Print Paint
Release Date: Date: 15.06.2022, a Part of Exhibition OVER.WRITE.ME (6.3) in Cankarjev Dom Ljubljana, Slovenia
UNICA ZÜRN Author and illustrator, born in Berlin in 1916, died in Paris in 1970, had devoted herself to anagrams. She set herself riddles whose starting point were quotations, lines of poetry or sayings. She anagrammed not only by letting the letters from favourite sentences dance up to new favourite sentences, but also by letting a staff of wondrous figures and symbols meet across all her writings of such a different kind to form the organs of a continually recreating body of text, decomposing and reassembling them again, and reinterpreting and reworking literary contexts in a discursive game – and on! Zürn opened up the great playground of intertextuality: Anagrams woven into prose, images into text, scores into drawings. In writing and overwriting his own auto-biography, Zürn constantly takes reality and fiction ad absurdum.
WHO IS AFRAID OF UNICA ZÜRN? Z ü r n would have turned one hundred in 2016, a fact that went largely unmentioned. 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Zürn’s death. Time for a Femmage that does not tell a work or a biography, but plays with both in the sense of Zürn, thinking Zürn further and making her unique artistic cosmos tangible in a fictionalised biography. Defying resistance and tragedy, Zürn allowed her highly complex and consistent work to emerge. The reduction of the artist to her biography, her being a muse and the stigma of mental illness, are here reduced to absurdity and thus dissolved. In this sound comic, the artist transforms herself into a superhero: the snake woman she has dreamed of several times. The emergence and passing of anagrams becomes an acoustic experience, words become letters, letters become rhythm, fairy tale-like becomes essayistic in sound worlds between madrigal and techno – a trip into the heart of surrealism.
WHAT IS A SOUND COMIC?
The electroacoustic duo Rdeča Raketa aka the composers Maja Osojnik and Matija Schellander and the author Natascha Gangl have been developing sound comics since 2016, which are series of live performances and radio pieces. Just as in comics word and image merge, here it is the spoken word and sound, sound becomes speech, speech becomes sound, contemporary composition meets literary experiment. Styles are eclectically combined, madrigal meets children’s book meets techno meets anagram meets hip-hop meets essay – ad infinitum – high culture, pop culture, subculture fused. Anti-heroines were the protagonists of the first two pieces, their surreal to psychedelic journeys leading into dense series of sonic images. WENDY HORSE DEATH MEXICO (2018) THE REVENGE OF THE SNAKE WOMAN (2020) LONELY ANTS AMNESIA (2021). Since 2019, the trio has been releasing vinyls on MAMKA Records and exploring the possibilities of visualising the sound artworks, working on graphic scores & concrete poetry, developing exhibitions.
„SIMULTANEOUSLY WEIRD AND WONDERFUL“ Aural Aggravitation, UK, 2018.
The Revenge of the Snake Woman was awarded 2021 by an expert jury of literary and cultural critics as the “most artistically sophisticated and appealing original radio play of the year 2020” Ö1/ORF
CREDITS:
MAM #06/2022
DIE REVANCHE DER SCHLANGENFRAU (THE REVENGE OF THE SNAKE WOMAN)
text: Natascha Gangl
music: Rdeča Raketa ( Maja Osojnik & Matija Schellander)
recorded and mixed 2019/2020: Rdeča Raketa
premaster: Matija Schellander
master: CLUNK
all rights reserved by Mamka Records, Natascha Gangl & Rdeča Raketa
friendly supported by kunstradio – radio kunst Ö1/ORF, SKE-Fonds, BMKOES
