The Extinction’s Voluptuous Odor

by Canilla from Berlin, Germany

Experimental

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Berlin based artist Canilla is a newly sculpted project by Norwegian sound artist and instrument builder Camilla Vatne Barratt-Due. Frequently composing for dance and theatre productions she develops sonic fields that often includes electronics and live coded synthesis merged with materials from her extensive accordion collection. Canilla’s performative installations have been presented in museums and theatres and sound-art, dance and music festivals in Germany, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, UK and Norway. She was recently chosen for SHAPE 21 – a European platform for innovative music and audio visual art.

The songs on ‘you always wanted more in life, but now you don’t have the appetite’ are thought of as conceptual love ballads stemming from trees of a wounded forest – originally coming out of an installation Canilla made for Kontakte Festival at Akademie der Künste in 2019. Behind the stories pumps a mechanical heart, a structure based on creations of dismantled accordions. Canilla works between installation and performance art, turning traditional analog materials such as old tools and accordions into altered mechanical systems played with code. This layering of practices gives electronic music a new physical body tracing the remnants of the past, giving the mechanical objects an afterlife.

Sound artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Else Marie Pade and Laurie Anderson inspire Canilla. She has collaborated with a wide range of artists stemming from live coding, contemporary music, theatre and dance productions, such as Jo Grys, Peter Cusack, Alexandra Cardenas and Ingri Fiksdal. Her work has also been presented at venues such as Akademi Der Künste (Berlin) Black Box Theatre (Oslo), London Royal Operahouse, HAU (Berlin) Radial System, Bergen International Festival and Stamsund International Theatre Festival (Norway).