The Echoes of the Sirens ponders the place of femininity in the world, bringing forth feminine voice, body and space. It is a landscape and a terrain of strange bodies echoing femininity. The work is inspired by Siren creatures, which, according to philosopher Adriana Cavarero, are “the most dangerous vocal creatures that the West has ever imagined.
The performance, written and directed by choreographer Heli Keskikallio opens up an ambivalent space with feminine echoes through whispering, singing, laughing, screaming, panting, humming and wavy bodies that form sounding, vibrating, tactile, spatial and transforming sound fields. The work questions the social, cultural and corporeal place that the patriarchal and phallocentric structure has created for the feminine. Listening to the echoes of often-silenced feminine histories, Keskikallio wants to imagine possible feminine futures as a utopia of unregulated femininity.
Thus, my task as a photographer has been to shape a timeless image of the sirens, trying to make the dancers’ bodies’ relationship to the performance topics visible—to the stones, to the space, to marks on the soil, to the friction between flashes. Photography is a challenging position: to be silent enough to make other voices audible.
Throughout their muted history, they have lived in dreams, silenced bodies, silences, silent rebellions. Hélène Cixous
