Xenia Xamanek’s album ‘Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay]’ originally written in 2019, orbits the horror stories “cuentos y leyendas de honduras” and legends they grew up with through childhood. Disrupting the rigidity of classic oratorio and opera, the release offers instead a “leaky” and fluid mode of oral storytelling, where Latin American myths interweave through abstract sonic sketches.
These legends transform and mutate across situated geographies in Central America, often dealing with themes of colonisation, class, race, gender. For Xamanek, uncovering the agendas behind mythologies offers a lens to critically analyse oppressions, for instance Spanish colonists use of the ‘siguanaba’ as a means to exercise control over indigenous and mestizo populations. Elsewhere, renditions of ‘la llorona’ a haunting weeping figure in white symbolise women who have faced brutalities. These stories also encompass resistance: ways of remembering historical injustice as a means to create haunting.
Central to the album, is the character of the snake, and the cultural multiplicities it embodies. At Mayan sites in Mesoamerica the number of snakes deterred Spanish colonists, through a Christian lens perceiving them as symbol of negativity or the devil. The album builds upon the cosmovision of the ouroboros, a snake biting its own tail, or the “midgårdsormen” in nordic mythology, as Xenia Xamanek frames the world through a spiraling snake moving in spirals upwards and downwards endlessly.
Through their haunting use of flutes and voices, Xamanek’s compositions dissolve certainties of physical presence. Sounds generated through air and bodies drift beside notions of the ghost body, where materiality is stripped yet breath still resonates. Refusing binary notions of life and death, the tracks are sonic explorations mediating the spectrum in-between realms. Within this locus Xamanek craft’s the tools for magic realism, resisting escapism and facing darkness without turning away.
Produced with support from Statens kunstfond.
![SR012: Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay] - Xenia Xamanek](https://nina.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fgateway.irys.xyz%2F3mL6c8WqTl3o-Txlix2YyMYFRFegNq8zFaOgAcrh9dY?ixlib=js-3.8.0&w=1080&fm=webp&s=9a74a5c58311dc61075ebe981ea3f85d)
