With Womens Work: Julia Santoli - Soleil Solace with Caroline Partamian and Suzueri
Thursday, February 18th, at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to stream Soleil Solace, a new work by multidisciplinary artist and experimental musician Julia Santoli in collaboration with sound artists Caroline Partamian and Suzueri. The piece is part of the With Womens Work series, commissioning artists to interpret and respond to scores included in Womens Work, a magazine first edited and self-published in 1975 by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood.
The piece responds to the score Sole Source by musicologist Heidi Von Gunden included in Womens Work Volume #1, 1975.
Notes from Julia Santoli on Soleil Solace:
”Soleil Solace" is built through a multi-part process, instigated by the video created by Julia Santoli with camera work by Bayley Sweitzer. This piece was made with the challenge of how to collaborate on interpretations of sensuous experience across barriers of time and space. Made amidst the vast changes of habit and political organization instigated by Covid occurrences, sharing deep communication through nations and oceans under a shared sun. The banal material of corner sweepings and closets undergo transformations testing the limits of material organization and character, micro systems and macro becoming indecipherable. Santoli (New York) wrote a text with visualisation instructions for deep focus and distant communion, which she provided to the artists. Santoli, Partamian (California), and Suzueri (Tokyo), practiced these visualisations before creating sonic interpretations of the visual textures of the video, tracking in trips focused on timbre, pitch, and intensity/duration. Santoli created the resultant quilt with these threads. Solace is not experienced alone.
Julia Santoli is a multi-disciplinary artist and experimental musician. Creating immersive and precarious environments with voice, feedback, electronics, psycho-acoustics, and installation, her work melds collaborative, site-specific sonic approaches with song structures. Her approach to vocalization integrates embodied practice with an attention to close listening and empathetic response, in compositions and structured improvisations often tipping the scales between resonant clarity and extreme sonic states. She was a 2019 Music Resident at Pioneer Works, 2019 Asian Cultural Council grantee to Japan researching sound art and spatial practices, and a 2018 Artist in Residence at ISSUE Project Room. Solo works and collaborations have been presented at many institutions, DIY spaces, and guerilla performances. She is one half of liil, alongside cellist Leila Bordreuil.
Caroline Partamian is a sound and visual artist. Her work is influenced by her training in dance as she integrates the concept of abreaction into her work – the extraction of dormant memory stored within a muscle, resurfaced through physical movement, of which an individual was previously unaware; these memories can take many forms – traumatic, erotic, comforting, etc. By focusing on the process rather than the anticipated result, her work encourages what can be revealed when one becomes conscious of their kinetic movement in the process of creation. Her work has taken on the form of compositions, graphic notations, sound environments, books, video, and more. She has shown work at BoxoPROJECTS, Marfa Open, Wassaic Project, Otion Front, Flux Factory, Anthology Film Archives, Babycastles, Compound Yucca Valley, and more. She also runs a small publishing press, Weird Babes, in the form of zines and prints featuring artists' and her own works-in-progress and experiments. www.carolinepartamian.com
Suzueri (Elico Suzuki) plays circuitous and restless performances using pianos combined with self-made instruments. Her recent interests have centered on the exploration of the gaps and narrative aspects between the interaction of instruments and particular embodiment. http://suzueri.org
