ORBIT (II)

Brigitta Muntendorf: ORBIT – A War Series (2023)

Surrounded by sound: In ORBIT – A War Series, the audience finds itself in an imaginary yet real place, thanks to forty loudspeakers distributed around the space, from which female AI voices of different origins emanate in various languages. Where do they come from? What are they saying? The German-Austrian composer Brigitta Muntendorf sums up the piece’s setting – commissioned by the Venice Biennale 2023 –  as follows: ‟ORBIT – A War Series is a shelter and a powerhouse, a place where listening creates an inner theater and becomes a political act, a radical listening.” The almost hour-long work refers to the New York artist Nancy Spero, whose drawings of The War Series (1966–70) explore the female body in the Vietnam War as a scene of demonstrations of power and violence. In Muntendorf‘s composition, the disembodied voices gradually regain presence and thus manifest themselves in the listener’s consciousness.

ORBIT – A War Series was realized particularly for a 3D audio space and was created in cooperation with d&b audiotechnik. The company, based in Backnang in southern Germany, is a partner of the 3D-Audio Art Lab, which is taking place for the first time as part of the Darmstadt Summer Course.