“Spacetime Roe“
Katalin Ladik
TX: Thursday, 10 September⋅12:00 – 12:15pm
Saturday, 12 September 6:00-6:15pm
“In 1953, at the age of eleven, I began my acting career at Radio Novi Sad, at a time when all programs—including radio plays and radio dramas—were broadcast live. The experience I gained as a radio actress later became an important source for my sound poetry works.
This work incorporates excerpts from the Hungarian-language audio archives of Radio Novi Sad (Yugoslavia, Serbia), originally broadcast on 212.4 MHz between 1957 and 2002.”
Audio Engineering: Szabolcs Puha
Katalin Ladik was born 1942 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and is currently based in Budapest, Hungary where she has lived and worked since the 1990s.
Her artistic output is at once sprawling, prolific and singular. Beginning as a poet and expanding into performances in the 1970s she developed her own theatrical language which eventually came to incorporate sound and visual poetry, performance art, experimental music, audio plays, happenings, mail art, collage, and photography.
Throughout Ladik’s work and particularly in her performances, the voice and the body (most often her own) converge to become a site in which the personal and political spheres overlap. Making use of diverse sources from mythic narratives to personal and everyday objects, she has consistently sought to investigate her role as a woman in her own Eastern European context, challenging dominant societal, sexual and gender norms.
She began her career with interventions on Radio Novi Sad (1963–77) and as an actress with the avant-garde theatre group Bosch+Bosch in the city of Subotica (1977–92). However, it was the publication of the record Phonopetica (1976) which drew the attention of sound poets abroad including Bob Cobbing, Gerhard Rühm and Henry Chopin who invited her to perform the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1977, and led to her international recognition and prominence within the fields of sound poetry and visual art.
Today her oeuvre includes written, sound and visual poetry; the visual arts, concept photography, performance art; happenings; experimental music; theatre, film and radio plays.
“Poet, actress, and visual artist Katalin Ladik has to be considered as one of the most pioneering artists alive…Her work is bound to feminist matters in Eastern Europe and reflects the personal, social and existential difficulties that female artists must face. Recurrent dual structures and the use of sexually ambiguous figures (androgynes and angels) as well as gender-neutralising elements inhabit her work, which occasionally acquires Shamanic overtones and integrates therapeutic mechanisms of liberation.”
– SoundOhm
Spacetime Roe (English Translation)
— Radio Novi Sad.
— Pistol, pistol, pistol.
— Latest report from the Korean battlefield: The North Korean troo troops have occupied three villages, villages. And never, never will anyone drop an atomic bomb on people.
— We hope so.
— The atomic bomb. They dropped it then on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
— Isn’t that right, Tadeo Chan, you learn a lot in third grade about birds and flowers?
— A lot.
— It is already night. I am afraid.
— You needn’t be afraid, Taeko Chan, I know the way to the bus station.
— The others have already returned to the city.
— Mother thinks he is dead, but she is still waiting for him. I also think that one day my father will return to us.
— Breathe, breathe, like this. Breathe. Aha.
— “The Israeli units have entered Egyptian territory from several directions.”
— … but I am tired and my eyes hurt…
— I would like to write you so very much more, but I am tired and my eyes hurt. Another time, when I feel better, I will write you more.
— Here, here, Brick…
— Who is it? Who is it? Who is it?
— Has Mama gone?
— Nonsense! Ah…
— Brick, Brick… it’s all right.
— Pinocchio, Pinocchio, Pinocchio…
— Chirrup-chirrup, chirrup-chirrup.
— He-he-he-he.
— Radio Novi Sad… Radio Novi Sad… Radio Novi Sad… Radio Novi Sad…
— I… I… I don’t know.
— Ha-ha-ha!
— That’s a good joke, isn’t it?
— No… but I don’t think… I don’t remember. No. I don’t know. No. I wasn’t looking for you.
— Hello!
— I don’t know.
— I don’t know.
— Rifle, rifle, rifle, rifle, rifle, rifle, rifle…
— Pistol.
— I want.
— Leukemic?
— Radio Novi Sad, Radio Novi Sad, Radio Novi Sad, Radio Novi Sad, Radio Novi Sad…
— Katibul, come out!
— Katalin Ladik, Grass Cage.
— Hu, hu, hu, hu, hu… hu, hu, hu, hu hu…
— I walked among five stars, after the seventh star I bit into a carnation.
— Pale in your arms… you pour honey into me.
— Window sits. The last creeping moth. No-memory of itself. Mirror of destruction. As the first sound of creation was the vibrating sound, and every being has its own sound, its own mantra… so from the dark comes the one who speaks out of me:
“Where are you, where are you, my breathing window, healing of my shadow…”
— A dog wriggles beneath the bridge. I ask, am I moving in the right direction? Am I moving in the right direction? And it answers me in the voice of the flute. This is the voice of Satan, frozen music. This bridge, black branches, black buds… this vertigo… this vertigo… this vertigo… the vertigo…
— Radio Novi Sad.
— I look in the stone. Not there. I look in the wood, not there. I look in the stone. Not there. I look in the wood, not there.
— My life a leaping shadow. Over a low flame I extract… Behold, the first gate: its light-seed in a black coat. There is no other desert that brings death to stone but the desert of indifference. It gives its sweat to the newly arrived. It will become the two-lived shadow, the Materia Prima into which the scream moves in.
— Spacetime roe, spacetime roe, spacetime roe, spacetime roe, spacetime roe, roe roe roe roe…
— Laments, laments, laments, laments, laments, laments, laments, laments, laments, laments…
— At dawns, at dawns, at dawns, at dawn…
— Are you in the wood? I will overtake you. Are you in my death? I shall not know you.
— Again the same aching vertebrate existence, drowned light in a joyless coat. A croaking vortex of being in Indra’s net of pearls.
— I repeat: it brings about the creation of new worlds. It brings about the creation of worlds… it brings about the creation of worlds…
— This cracked wall is pregnant with sleeping sickness. Who is this wasp above me? Who is this woman whitewashing inside me? If all that surrounds me is wall, if I am a wasp and inside me this insect is human, then where do I end, where does the human begin?
— I look in the stone, not there. I look in the wood, not there. I look in the stone, not there. I look in the wood, not there.
— Radio Novi Sad.
— Few lived on that mountain. They smoked with sulphur all night long, waiting for the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. Some grave epidemic was raging in the jealously guarded Garden. With bloody wings, with burn wounds, they passed over the snowfields.
……
Fragments used from the following radio plays / sound works:
- RADIO NOVI SAD_mp3 — Pause sound, sound pause on Radio Novi Sad by Ernő Király
- 0008 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS – NÉMETH P. ISTVÁN — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
- 0016 VAJK VERA — Tale of the Seven-Spotted Ladybird
- 0019 ANTE ILIĆ — The Legend of a Thousand Paper Doves
- 0087 COLLODI — Pinocchio
- 0136-0122 CARLO COLLODI — Pinocchio
- 0205-0206 GYÁRFÁS MIKLÓS — Young Ladies in the Heights
- 0208 MIHAL TONECKI — Encounter in the Fairytale Café
- LADIK KATALIN – FŰKETREC / GRASS CAGE — Katalin Ladik performs her own poems, 2002. WAV
The author of the interval signal of Radio Novi Sad is the composer Ernő Király
( 16 March 1919 – 14 December 2007 ).