Yoiking in Honor of Venice 

 

Ánde Somby, yoiker
Sara Marielle Gaup Beaska, yoiker
Máret Áile Gaup Beaska, yoiker

 

Concert

20 October 2022, h 5 pm

Auditorium “Lo Squero”

Island of San Giorgio Maggiore

Venice

 

 

The Intercultural Institute for Comparative Music Studies, in collaboration with “The Sámi Pavilion” project at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), presents a yoik concert performed by three traditional Sámi yoikers from Norway. The event is curated by Nicola Renzi.

 

 

Among the indigenous Sámi people inhabiting the coast, the tundra and vast boreal forests of the European Arctic, the yoik is an ancestral vocal practice through which they commemorate people, evoke places, animals and other elements of the natural landscape. The yoik has various functions that are articulated on a social, cosmological and ecological level. A yoik, for instance, may be a gift made by the creator of the song to the subject it evokes, while in indigenous rituality the yoik has relevant shamanic implications related to the sound metamorphosis between human and non-human. At the same time, according to Sámi cosmology, the yoik is not a practice expressed exclusively by Man: the Sámi also hear the yoik in the voices of rivers and birds, the wind and the mountains of the Sápmi, the ancestral territory of the Sámi that stretches across the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia (Kola Peninsula).

 

In 2022, the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was transformed into the “The Sámi Pavilion”, with an exhibition entirely dedicated to the indigenous art and culture of the Sámi people. To celebrate this important and unprecedented recognition, as well as the welcome that Sámi community received in Venice, the famous yoiker Ánde Somby created a luohti (the melody of the yoik) that not only symbolises the bond between the Sámi artistic community and the city of Venice, but also commemorates the uniqueness of this place and its central role in European and global interculturalism. The ‘yoik of Venice‘ will be performed at the opening of the concert through an official musical donation ceremony to the City of  Venice and will later be preserved in the IISMC archives.

 

The donation will be followed by a concert in which the vocal practice of the yoik will be proposed in its most traditional form. Ánde Somby will perform a yoik cycle entitled ‘The animals inside the human and the human outside the animals’. Through the performance of a specific repertoire dedicated to the evocation of the animals of the tundra, the shamanic function of the yoik will be introduced and the ecological and cosmological relations between man and animal in Sámi thought will be commented on. Ánde Somby’s performance will be followed by that of Sara Marielle Gaup Beaska, who – together with her daughter Máret Áile Gaup Beaska – will present a repertoire of luohti aimed at illustrating the yoik as the ‘art of remembering’ in relation to people, villages, and landscapes of the Sápmi.

 

The concert is open to the public. Registration is required.

It is possible to register on eventbrite. Here is the link.