Kateryna Zavoloka: »I will never be a political or social artist«

Zavoloka: »When Russia invaded in 2014 [annexation of Crimea], I thought I had to somehow say no, and used the samples I collected to make an album with the sounds of the revolution. It was a kind of answer to what's going on in my life. I will never be a political or social artist.«

»Vilna« from the album Volya was recorded during the Maidam Revolution in 2014 and consists of recordings of burning police cars, sounds from street fights and exploding grenades and Molotov cocktails. »Volya« means freedom.

Gender balance in the music and dance scene, respectively, is still very skewed. With a predominance of male musicians and female dancers, we as drummers and dancers therefore have very different experiences in terms of perception of gender and bodies. In our constellation, however, we have a feeling that we have escaped the typical notions and expectations of gender, and we, as Meshes, have therefore not yet dealt directly with questions about this. A blind spot in our practice? Or something we are generally exhausted from dealing with? The invitation to the publication here has thus set some thoughts in motion, and with the gender glasses on, we will again relate to the relationship between our two media, dance and drums, and to how our social relationships affect our artistic practice.

Over the past year, I have thought a lot about what the physical space means for my work. My boyfriend usually leaves for work Monday through Friday, and then I have the whole apartment to myself. 

Sometimes I sit in the study at my desk with the electric piano to my left. In front of me hangs a bulletin board with detached notes I have written on small notes and hung up between postcards and other small items. To the right is the filing cabinet with paper, sheet music and old notes.

Other times, it seems like the workplace is full of expectations I can not live up to: here I have to be a diligent, focused person who does what she sets out to do. So I sit down in the living room instead. Sitting at the dining table or in the armchair and looking out the window. If not I'm just doing something completely different – there's always something practical you can fix instead. Laundry, dishes, shopping. Later I go back to the study again.

Since 2017, we have been living in an apartment in Copenhagen's Nordvest Quarter. Before that, we had spent several years travelling, as we had been doing different residencies and studies abroad. From this travel experience, it has been necessary for us to work in very different rooms and spaces, collapsing an artist studio into the space of a suitcase. This has impacted our work in various ways, for example, during a performance tour in Japan, Ragnhild worked with the suitcase format, as she designed an instrument that precisely fit into the weight and measurements of international air travel. 

She has to listen to man-splaining on a daily basis when buying materials in the local hardware store

We both began our studies at the Jutland Art Academy in Aarhus in 2007. Since then, we have played together in our band Måske bare musik (Maybe Just Music). Our approach back then was an experimental investigation of sounds through play, without thinking - just play and see what happens…and it still is today, 14 years later. Since the beginning, we have been working with four constraints:



1) never play in the same place twice

2) everything, rehearsals as well as concerts, is improvised

3) always take a photo of the place and the setup

4) everything is recorded

How do you experience that gender and bodies are important in your artistic work?

It is most often in the meeting with the outside world, for example in a meeting with a journalist, that I experience that my gender matters. Here, for example with the band Selvhenter, we always get questions that relate to the fact that we are women. And it is especially through the conversations that have subsequently arisen in the group that I have become aware of how to tackle the outside world's view of being a woman and a musician/composer. For example, we have come up with a strategy where we ask the journalist back: »What do you mean when you say feminine?« Or: »What do you mean by masculine sound?« The terms feminine and masculine are used as if we all understand what they represent, but I find it very vague. I think it is more fruitful to talk about experiences, sound, art or energy without giving it a gender, e.g. to talk about something 'open', 'outgoing' or 'calm' instead of saying masculine or feminine. I am often irritated by the fact that what we have to talk about to journalists always relates to gender and not just to the music itself.. I would very much like to talk about the music and the thoughts behind it and not spend all my time talking about gender. 

For the last 25+ years, I have mostly worked with improvisation and composition in a hybrid and fluid field that can contain elements of free / experimental jazz, electronic, noise, new compositional music, etc.

My practice in improvisation ranges from 'free' improvisation to varying degrees of structured or conceptual improvisation: ie. a mixture of predefined and 'free' elements. 'Free' is in quotation marks, for no improvisation is ever completely free, even if it is free from following a score and free from certain style norms and rules. Contemporary improvisational music is also called instant composing, real-time composition , etc. I use improvisation in this text. My approach to improvisation is closely intertwined - or rather entangled - with my work with slow composition. 

As a musician, singer and composer, I have been taught by, studied with and worked with women as well as men. I experience that the difference of meeting with different partners, colleagues and teachers lies primarily in the individual person more than in gender. That, in any case, is what I want and strive for. 

Over time, I have become aware that I reason best with responsiveness, curiosity, honesty, clear communication, courage, openness – also for any. conflicts in my artistic collaborations. In addition, the collective and trusting in collaborations built up over time is wildly interesting, just as collaborations that challenge and develop me, as well as colleagues or even the audience. Finally, I find that a common understanding of or sense of aesthetics and time is crucial to whether an artistic collaboration can work.

The lofty concepts in my professional environment are considered asexual as long as men are in focus - and gendered when we see a woman. From the beginning of my career, music journalists have described my appearance as a prologue to describe my artistic work. Since then, it has become a concrete thematization of female composers, which I thought was, at the beginning of my career,  both unnecessary and superfluous, but which I have later increasingly experienced had to be articulated. As a professional environment, the world of composition has no place for women without being exceptional, exotic and can be instrumentalized as an exception. It is similar to 50% of the world's population, but is professionalized as a minority.

The project, Dear Daughter/Sen_sing_inannainanna (Russ, Shiva, Klein), which is part of a series of voice-based live performances, video documents, and performative speech installations, was first performed in a public bus connecting two institutions of art in Copenhagen: The museum Glyptoteket, with its collection of art and archeological objects encompassing a time span of 6000 years, and the art center Copenhagen Contemporary, that exhibit contemporary art. 

In this audio paper the artist reflects on how she, during her live performace Dear Daughter/Sen_sing_inannainanna (Russ, Shiva, Klein) (2019) used her voice to perform mothering towards strangers on a bus while sharing, by mantra singing, eco-feminist thought on the necessity of caring for others in times of planetary crisis. Central to the audio paper is an episode that happened during the live performance where the artist demonstrated how the figure of the female cyborg, and technology as a tool, can be used to subvert gender-based verbal violence.