above: excerpt from Arkhe - Lost Canto, 2017 - 2024 [to hear the sound press the sound icon located in the lower right corner of the moving image]

Arkhe - Lost Canto

2017 - 2024

Digital film + sound composition

Duration: 13 minutes 24 seconds

Limited edition of 3 + 2 AP

Credits

Camera, montage, music/sound composed, choreography by Monika Weiss

Movement Performer 1: Anupama Kerongi

Movement Performer 2: Monika Weiss

Text in English and Polish: Monika Weiss

Voice 1: Katie Beyers, sporano

Voice 2: Ingrid Piazza, messo soprano

Percussion: Monika Weiss

Artist Statement

I filmed the majority of Arkhe - Lost Canto in 2017 on Kanchanjungha, Himalaya, the third highest mountain in the world. I spent some time there, in kingdom of Sikkim, which was annexed by India, but retains a desire for independence and is mostly Buddhist. I was able to work with my assistant and performer, Anupama Kerongi, whom I choreographed performing silent gestures of lamentation on the mountain. This work is inspired by the energy of the mountain. It is about becoming one with the mountain and one the wind, about honoring of this wounded planet on one of its highest elevations.

I thought I lost this footage but I found it again several years later. This event of finding the Lost Canto came together with finishing the sixth and last movement of my long-term sound work, Metamorphosis. Titled Arkhe, the sixth movement is sang by two sopranos Katie Beyers and Ingrid Piazza. "Arkhe" (Greek: ἀρχή) is a word that refers to beginning or to origins; it can also describe the first principle from which everything derives. The last movement in the sound composition is meant to revert us to archaic and ancient times, to the origins. The percussive sounds that we hear resemble ancient drums. I recorded my bare hands hitting my Metamorphosis sculpture, which itself is a resonant instrument. As it often happens in my process, the sound and the image came together, eventually.

The other filmed sequences in Arkhe - Lost Canto, include views of the 2017 Sun Eclipse, which I filmed in Brooklyn, on the rooftop of Dina Helal, my dear friend, artist and educator, who since departed. In another sequence, we see an immersion/lamentation performed by me in a small creek, as if trying to become one with the river, performed and filmed at the Creative Music Studio, Upstate New York, 2016. Camera assistance was provided by my husband, writer and musician, Kurt Gottschalk. At that time I was also honored to participate in a workshop ran by the great American composer Pauline Oliveros, who died later that year.