photo: Andrea Vollmer
ANIMITA was commissioned by the Haus für Poesie (Berlin) and premiered in the first concert series “Reimagining the Lied” in October 2023 at the Heimat Hafen Neuekölln.
ANIMITA is a process of artistic collaboration between the poet Felipe Sáez Riquelme and the composer VíctorPiano. The two first met in a residency at the “Wiepersdorf Schloss” organized by the Haus for Poesie and then developed the project in Berlin and Hamburg.
An “animita” is a kind of altar/memorial, placed in public spaces throughout Chile, where people have died from (most of the time) terrible accidents. These altars are built by the circles close to the person who suffered the accident, but over time they become part of the communities surrounding the memorials, as they come to ask favors-miracles to the people who died in those places.
Therefore, an animita is in several senses a transition: life and death, intimacy and public, horror and miracle.
ANIMITA is a cycle of 5 songs for Tenor and Tape (intended to be performed in a specific order and always all 5).
Although each of the songs has a distinctive characteristic in its vocal technique and in the electronics that accompany them, in all of them we can find different sonorous elements -proper of public and popular spaces- that are the nucleus for their development.
This leads to a piece where there is an encounter of very versatile musics that go from the hardest urban music heard in the popular spaces in Chile to the melismas and melodic lines characteristic of Oliver Messiaen’s music.