Eupepsia/Dyspepsia (SOLD OUT)

Tickets £19 // Concession £16 // Under 30 £5
Advance booking required

Ictus Ensemble

Eva Reiter (Austria, 1976) & Karin Harrasser
Eupepsia/Dyspepsia (2021) 68’ UK Premiere

Eva Reiter and Karin Harrasser’s Eupepsia/Dyspepsia is a sound museum. It depicts the history of 18th century Bolivia, and the violent effects of its colonisation by Spain. Through a large-scale work envisioned as part-conference, part-performance, Reiter documents the Indigenous music of the country, and the way it travelled to Europe through Jesuit missionaries. In this appropriated music, Reiter and Harrasser identifies the dominant colonial legacy of the Western world, a history often made invisible in service of the favourable revisions of history we are taught.  

Connecting different musical traditions and merging them into one another, the sounds of Reiter and Harrasser’s piece actually suggest silence, the attempts to quell cultures and the symbols that came with them. The word eupepsia refers to ‘good digestion’, and serves here as a metaphor for the West’s easy, free-flowing destruction of the world around it – as well as the seemingly natural way it adopted and passed on music and art as its own. In Reiter’s own words, ‘Eupepsia offers hybrids not as solutions or remedies, but as sound-objects to ponder the longue durée of cultural violence.’

Co-commissioned and co-produced by Onassis Stegi, SPOR, Time of Music, Ultima, Wilde Westen and hcmf//

Eupepsia is part of the Sounds Now project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Photo © Gorm Branderup | Skæg & Ballade for SPOR festival.