Text by CLOT Magazine
Zosia Hołubowska is a sound artist and a queer activist, a member of the Oramics collective and the co-founder of Sounds Queer? Also known as Mala Herba, their practice is deeply rooted in Slavic folklore, healing rituals and queer as metholody of composing music. Last March, they released their debut album, Singing Warmia, and today, we’re premiering the video for the track I Don’t Know The Dialect Hard To Tell / Nie Znam Gwary Ciężko Stwierdzić.
Singing Warmia is based on the sonification of images from their home region. It attempts to deal with the lack of family archives and a multi-generational connection to the land. Their family are repatriates and migrants, so Hołubowska was born in Warmia but is not from there. On the other hand, most of the people who lived there before WWII were either exterminated or expelled. So, it is a landscape inhabited by ghosts and untold stories while its history has been uprooted. Hołubowska explains.
Peter Mazur is the artist behind I Don’t Know The Dialect Hard To Tell / Nie Znam Gwary Ciężko Stwierdzić, who generated the images from scratch taking as inspiration only a mood board created by Hołubowska with some inspirations regarding the Warmia landscape and traditional architecture. The video is an imaginative and creative interpretation of the music, says Hołubowska. I find it fascinating how they complement each other. One of the album’s other songs contains a little story Hołubowska collected through an artistic project on storytelling they participated in over 15 years ago. It was by the TRATWA organisation.
The story stayed with them all those years. It is about Ukrainian refugees resettling to Warmia and finding empty houses abandoned by expelled Germans and Warmiaks people. They didn’t want to enter these houses and preferred to sleep in the forest, although it was silent and empty, as the birds and animals ran away from the noises of the war. Unknowingly, Peter recreated this image as if he had read my mind. Concludes Hołubowska.
