Multimedia artist Agnes Momirski is currently creating new work siXren (Verbum Magicae) as part of the residency programme at MGLC Švicarija. In her art practice, Momirski, who has been based in Rotterdam over the past several years, departs from a deeply embodied practice rooted in voice and language, exploring arcane, healing, ritual and ceremonial methods through a posthumanist lens. These inform her artistic executions within the framework of her multimedia performances and videos.

siXren (Verbum Magicae) is a piece with two different materialisations. It is a music performance that will be premiered at MGLC Švicarija and an ambient installation with an experimental video.

The siXren (Verbum Magicae) project is inspired by the models of ancient healing rhetorics. The work explores the psychoacoustic effects of ancient verbal and sound formulas used in healing ceremonies, while it abstracts and reapplies them into the matrix of contemporary sounds. Between digital and animate, pre-modern and hyper-modern, we enter the liminal space between the Earth’s rhythm and aesthetics of experimental noise music. Our techno-ecology has lost touch with the Earth’s rhythm and is permeated with sonic disturbances. Ancient linguistic/sound patterns were considered as healing transformative agents and as the missing link between man and nature. Practices such as ancient Greek rhetoric, word magic, ritual poetry, as well as contemporary cognitive science and wellbeing methods, utilise the primordial power of utterance, rhythm and sound to affect our animal senses and consequently our body biology, brain chemistry, sensory and cognitive clarity. The ancient knowledge of verbal formulae serves to establish a new relationship with nature in the coming era of posthumanity and informs the current sonic imaginary with poetic and healing sensibility.

siXren (Verbum Magicae) is made in collaboration with beepblip (sound) and Brina Vidic (visual and costume design).

Agnes Momirski is a multimedia artist who completed her BA in Fine Art at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and her MA at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. In her work, she addresses the relationship between the human body and technology while using different artistic means such as performance, music/sound, installation, photography and film. Together with her close collaborator Georgia Kareola, she is the founder of the Specter platform. She lives and works in Rotterdam and in Ljubljana.