DUO MIAMAR

Mia Zabelka (AT) – Violin, Voice
Maria Do Mar (PT) – Violin, Voice
 
“Two violins, two voices, giving shape to a deeply performative music (not to say “theatrical”) that transformed its materialism—its physicality, its elemental energy—into a metaphysics, reaching into what lies beyond the human, or into what is more-than-human within the boundaries explored by Benjamin, Sartre, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Negri, Deleuze, Haraway, and Braidotti since the last century.

The protagonists were Austrian Mia Zabelka—well known for her collaborations with Pauline Oliveros, the mentor of “deep listening,” with Maggie Nicols, one of the founders of the pioneering Feminist Improvising Group, and with Lydia Lunch, the eternal screamer of self-empowerment—and the Portuguese Maria do Mar—an increasingly transdisciplinary artist who recently incorporated her ecofeminist and post-humanist perspectives, through Butoh minimalism, in the trio with Atau Tanaka and Adriana Sá. 

What unfolded at the Conde Távora was something I would describe as a ritual of sorority: the spontaneous and empirical staging of a relationship, devoid of power dynamics, hierarchical organization, or patriarchal mirroring. A space of feminine belonging, a “heterotopia” (Michel Foucault), or a “temporary autonomous zone” (Hakim Bey), where two women laid the foundations for another kind of society—egalitarian and free—blending the historical premises of improvised music with the tenets of feminist and queer theory into a framework of mutual support, unity-in-difference, and solidarity. Within their interwoven flows, there was cultural inclusivity (an openness to all types of sonic material), identity sharing and a transformative drive (what we were witnessing was the enactment of an entire utopia). The so-called “art of the duo” emerged as the ideal vehicle for this expression of sisterhood: cooperation, reciprocity, pursuit of balance, and continuous negotiation—none of which implied the construction of fixed commitments.” Rui Eduardo Paes.

Photo © Jose Felix da Costa