On the stage of an auditorium, a singer with a disturbing voice starts singing a Venezuelan tonada, accompanied by a theorbo and a baroque guitar, looking out at an empty house. A door discreetly opens at the top of the stalls. The trio then performs “la embarazada del viento”, a traditional song about the mysterious pregnancy of a teenage girl.

To start with there is la embarazada del viento, that traditional song from Margarita Island, off the coast of Venezuela. I’ve been listening to it since I was ten, and I immediately noticed the strange potential of those words, a kind of Annunciation, in a folkloric version.  I’m very interested in religious reminiscences in traditional music.  During a residency at Pollen in 2010, I started to write a project based on this music.  I had long wanted to film musicians, and it seemed to me that this text echoed a certain confusion already present in my work.  With this project, I was keen to capture the disorder which may be caused by listening to a piece of music.  NL