RIPARIA Direct-to-Disc Live Performance by Emilija Škarnulytė

RIPARIA
Direct-to-Disc Live Performance
by Emilija Škarnulytė

This live sonic performance is inspired by Škarnulytė’s film Riparia (2023), which follows a water goddess as a cipher for understanding the spiritual and threatened realities of rivers as sites of extraction and inaugurates the year of the snake. Working in collaboration with the team at Rey Vinilo, Škarnulytė’s performance will be directly captured into a vinyl. As water flows through a river and leaves a unique trace, in this special one-off session, audio frequencies will travel directly to the stylus, inscribing them as a spiral groove onto the master disc to replicate 10 exclusive lacquer disc copies, cut one by one.

Rivers have nourished state-level societies from their very beginning. By providing both water and transit, the river has been critical to the formation of complex states, with all that implies. In the controversial theories of archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, peaceful and matriarchal societies thrived along rivers in Neolithic Europe before the arrival of Proto-Indo-Europeans, with goddess figurines being one of their few remaining visible traces. In her perspective, the riparian environment
was transformed from a site of worship to a site of extraction and conflict.
Riparia proposes a visual crossing of the of the water, beyond the waves, scraping the benthic seabed, the domain of the riparian and the lacustrine, to read the effects of human intervention.

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