Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus - ,Throw

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For the 2022 edition of Rewire Festival, writer and artist Holly Childs and composer and sound artist Gediminas Žygus commissioned a new video work from filmmakers Marijn Degenaar and Nicola Baratto, to accompany a new live performance that would debut at The Hague’s foremost experimental music and arts festival. The result was ‘, Throw,’ an audiovisual composition that started life towards the end of 2021, but that has gathered new, devastating resonance over the first few months of 2022. Developed from a poem that Childs wrote in the heat of the summer on visiting Odesa, Ukraine back in 2018, ‘, Throw’ is a reflection on fleeting moments of desire entangled inextricably with an intoxicating sense of place, as well as love letter to and from Odesa, an invocation of the city in both the interiority of the viewer and of a memory of its exterior physicality, caught out of time. “Odesa is a beautiful and often mythologized city in literature, and itself an influence on modern literature as it was a hub for a lot of writers and poets throughout the 19th and 20th century,” explain Childs and Žygus. “After we invited Nicola and Marijn, together we started adapting the poem to a musical composition in December 2021 with the idea that we would shoot the video in Athens (we decided to film there in order to get plenty of sunshine in early spring). It was just meant to be a spiritual homage to the magic of this Black Sea trading and tourist city. But the composition took on a completely different meaning as we worked on it, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine escalated in the last week of February.”

Centering around a yearning dialogue between two voices, one of them director and performer Marijn Degenaar ‘, Throw’ refracts sunlit vignettes of the city on the Black sea, focusing imagery through a lens clouded by heat haze and sea spray. In the context of the unremitting brutality of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the melancholy nostalgia that steeps each of the work’s voices speaks to unbelievable tragedy, the longing of its protagonists expanding into a eulogy for peace in a country shrouded by war and a sun-tinged prayer of hope for a return to the light. “We were devastated for our friends in Ukraine,” Childs and Žygus continues. “We had scheduled to shoot the video in early March in Athens; working on it became a way of dealing with anger, fear and grief. Remembering what Odesa is, was, and will be when invasion is over.” In this sense the esoteric directions given by the film’s protagonists work to locate Odesa both in memory and, more urgently, in the transformational phase the city has been thrust into. The search for the city is also a search for those who know the city as it has been, as well as how it can be. “The characters who voice the track triangulate physical materials in a quest to find *you*, the one who is missing, describing to you where they are, using what’s close at hand as echolocation, radar, a verbal map, bouncing locational information between available landmarks,” explains Childs. “And what are the most significant landmarks? The sun, the moon and the earth. This feeling of triangulation begins and ends with celestial elements.” Bloody toes and towels on the shore serve as talismans of a specific time, just as the pontoon, the bistro and the dolphinarium are elevated to totems of a specific space, markers by which to navigate the sun and the sea.

You can find Nicola Baratto, Holly Childs, Marijn Degenaar and Gediminas Žygus on Instagram. For more information about Rewire Festival, follow them on Instagram and visit their website.

, Throw Credits:

Music and Text – Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus
Video – Marijn Degenaar & Nicola Baratto
Voices – Danae Io, Marijn Degenaar
Performance – Naya Ferentinou, Marijn Degenaar, Yannis Iasonidis
Costumes – Serapis Maritime
Jewellery – Sankto Leono
Production Coordination – Viktor Gogas
Mixed and Mastered – James Ginzburg

Nicola and Marijn would like to thank Bend Studio, Despina Pavlaki, Yannis Iasonidis, Manolis Lemos, George Tigkas, Jola, Ilias Sanidas, Easton West, Yiannis Mouravas. Shout out to Poseidon too.

Commissioned for the 2022 edition of Rewire Festival.

© & ℗ Subtext / Multiverse LTD. 2021