Gravitational Shift (2019 -) is a continuous choral work by soprano and composer Katinka Fogh Vindelev, conceptualised in collaboration with visual artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen. 

Gravitational Shift manifests in many different forms: It is a performative choral work; a series of workshops; a vinyl and digital album featuring opera singers, retirees, and the opera trio Ilinx. It is a song book; a spatial installation; a process.

Across its many instantiations, the work aims to explore the potentials of collectivizing what were immediately experienced as lonely and isolating instances of pain and trauma in childbirth.

A frequent characteristic of trauma is the sufferer's feeling of isolation and alienation. However, by transforming individual expressions of pain into a shared choral experience, Gravitational Shift experiments with the power of collective aesthetic processes to reconfigure trauma in ways that verbal narrative and direct representation may not.

The composition is based on time-stretched sound recordings of women's affective birthing sounds to obtain the concealed melodies of fright and pain. What you hear is not the actual birthing sounds, but the melodies retrieved by time-stretching and transcribing birth-recordings, and the resultant composition is elongated, meditative, and contemplative in its expression.

By thus attempting to ‘dialogue’ with fright, rather than reproducing its affect, the work explores the social (and potentially constructive, generative, and ‘worlding’) dynamics of gestalting collectivity through song.

Background
Classical singer and electroacoustic composer Katinka Fogh Vindelev and visual artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen have previously collaborated on the opera Moonologue, performed at Louisiana and Henie Onstad in 2018-19 on the occasion of the exhibition of Kølbæk Iversen’s video work Io/I in the exhibition The Moon. Further, Kølbæk Iversen released her record Donnimaar. Vredens Børn on Fogh Vindelev’s label MoBC Records in 2021-22.

Buy the record here: https://katinkafoghvindelev.bandcamp.com/album/gravitational-shift