Piotr Grden, Theresa Stroetges & Zorka Wollny

ORDER

05 July 2016

INVITED BY NIINA LEHTONEN BRAUN

Order is a composition for the Teutonic Castle in Swiecie for a choir of fifteen people, three instrumentalists and electronics made in 2015.
The movie by Piotr Grden presenting the process of composing and the final performance will be screened at 7:30 and at 9PM.

The concert for the Teutonic Order's Castle in Swiecie was a collaboration between Zorka Wollny and Theresa Stroetges with guest appearances of percussionists Dominik Korb, Imari Kokubo and Krzysztof Topolski. The composition was created especially for the building, inspired by the castle's architecture and history, created on site during a period of two weeks of sound workshops for the inhabitants of the town.

The dichotomic nature of the teutonic order was a central inspiration for the composition. On the one hand the castle was ruled by the quiet isolated life of a monastery, but at the same time it was also the place for the knights' military training for their mission of violent conversion of the surrounding towns and villages. This is reflected by the juxtaposition of gentle murmuring sounds and sudden violent parts in the composition. The percussion instruments and the voices - tools chosen because of the historical specificity of the architecture - were supported by electronic sound. The six parts of the concert refer to the six times of prayer in a day according to medieval liturgy and the monasticism of the order. The performance of the concert was fully embedded in the architecture and took place in the main chapel, the refectory, the basement, the gallery and on the battlements of the castle.

Zorka Wollny is a polish artist and composer. Her works function at the boundary between the theatre and visual arts and are strictly related to the architecture. She collaborates with musicians, actors and every time with members of local communities too. Her works were shown at the most prestigious institutions of contemporary art in Poland, moreover, she participated in international exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London (2014), Akademie der Künste in Berlin (2013), at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2012), Abteiberg Museum, Muenchengladbach (2012), at Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011), Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrad (2011), Carrara International Sculpture Biennale (2010), Z33, Hasselt (2010), Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2009) and Royal College of Art in London (2009). www.zorkawollny.net

Theresa Stroetges (Golden Diskó Ship) is a Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist and video artist who performs live as a one-girl orchestra. Her imaginative soundscapes, shifting from delicate melodic lines steeped in nostalgia to the feedback arcs and textured distortion of machine abuse, evoke lucid dreams and have won critical praise for their fresh, eclectic collages of electronic and acoustic sound. Her debut solo album, Prehistoric Ghost Party, was produced at the legendary Faust Studio, home of the Klangbad label, and her tracks have also been released on Monika Enterprise's City Splits # 1 and The Wire Tapper's June 2012 compilation. http://www.goldendiskoship.com/

Piotr Grden is a musician and a movie director. He collaborates with many art institutions as well as Polish Culture TV (TVP Kultura), and is an autor of movies about music and culture production in Poland.