Voice artist, composer and radio maker, Rwandan-Belgian artist Aur\u00e9lie Nyirabikali Lierman is it all. She focuses emphatically on her personal field recordings: a large collection of unique sounds and soundscapes of rural and urban contemporary East Africa. In her work, she fuses voice art, audio art and contemporary composition in a very personal way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Umva<\/em>!, Lierman further breaks open the boundaries between radio art and storytelling. Listeners are each given wireless headphones at the start of the performance and immersed in a hybrid sound world that unfolds from the connection between instrumental and vocal music, bruitage, Afrique concr\u00e8te and abstract electronics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Umva!<\/em> (meaning ‘listening’), Lierman – born in Rwanda but raised in Belgium – draws direct inspiration from a series of life-changing encounters with Kanyoni Ladislas, her 113-year-old Rwandan grandfather. Lierman considers him a legend: during his long life as a hunter and traditional healer, he witnessed how colonisation, the struggle for independence, genocides and post-war conflicts transformed Rwanda into the fragile country it is today. She last visited him in 2021, in the Virunga, where she also discovered another impressive part of his life: him, in his younger years, as a master of cows, leading large herds throughout the region of Lierman’s ancestors. This – together with his already exceptional work as a healer and hunter – gave him an even more unique position in Rwanda’s (pre-colonial) society. Through her grandfather, Lierman gained access to the beauty of the inyambo cow and the sophisticated complexity of Rwanda’s underexposed ancient esoteric cow cult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Umva!<\/em> shows the outcome of Lierman’s research into forms of animism, the belief in a complete, animated world, and the ways in which animistic worldviews have managed to survive despite fierce oppression through heavy colonisation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Composition: Aur\u00e9lie Nyirabikali Lierman – Musical dramaturgy: Romain Bischoff – Performers: Soa Ratsifandrihana, Raphaela Danksagm\u00fcller, Maya Felixbrodt, Aur\u00e9lie Nyirabikali Lierman, Yung-Tuan Ku and Kaito Winse – Light technician: Niels Kingma – Sound technician: Stefan Bos <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Umva! is a concept by Aur\u00e9lie Nyirabikali Lierman and production by Diogo Marques.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n As part of Sounds Now, co-funded by the European Union\u2019s Creative Europe programme.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n