Vivaldi Meets Orientalism

Vivaldi Meets Orientalism is a seven-minute audiovisual work made in 2021 with the Amsterdam-based video artist and performer Can Bora, who also appears in it. It was released online in November 2021.

The sound is built from Vivaldi — the most over-played bars in the Western canon, sampled, frozen and re-pitched until the violins turn into a kind of synthetic ney — and set against recordings of Istanbul street sound and my own voice singing in makam. Nothing is blended politely. The two musics are made to share a room and talk over each other, and the video, in which a single performer moves between a costume of Western gallery-orientalism and plain clothes, keeps asking which of them is the exotic one.

It is a piece about being looked at — about the very old habit of hearing the East as decoration — and it answers by decorating Vivaldi.