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VNM Festival 2025
Whispered Folds: Day 1
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Whispered Folds is a metaphor for the overlapping layers of identity, experience, and resonances that are explored in this year’s VNM festival. Using sound as a powerful medium to reimagine relationships between individuals, cultures and spaces, the artists invite us to consider how sound reflects and disrupts physical, psychological, and cultural borders.
Émilie Payeur’s In Between explores the fluid borders between the self and the collective, between vulnerability and connection, inviting listeners into a shared liminal space. Drawing from Payeur’s research and exploration of the Balinese Calonarang ritual through a psychoanalytic lens, In Between explores how notions of the sacred, the symbolic, and transcendence can be embodied through sound, objects and actions. This work challenges the expected forms of sound performance, blending media and dissolving conventional frameworks, while representing a personal journey, confronting self-imposed limits and welcoming imperfection and rawness.
Parmela Attariwala will present works that endeavour to hybridize conflicting metaphors from her artistic and ethnocultural worlds—united by a focus on end of life. Her performance will begin and close with two fully-embodied works choreographed by bharata-natyam artists Sujit Vaidya and Gitanjali Kolanad respectively. These works will frame unworded settings of poems from the Sikh night-time prayer (which is also recited at death), and an improvisation with a departed friend.
RED is a large-scale speaker-wire handwoven electronic instrument created by Cecilia Lopez that investigates interactions with unstable acoustic feedback systems. The piece works as a cluster of sonic feedback that is sensitive to its surroundings, where the sounds and movements in the space affect and shape the sonic result. This kind of exploration invites performers and audiences into the space where they both affect and are affected by the sound phenomena. Sound is modulated by “presence” and “touch” and occupies the space as acoustic architecture, while the interaction between the performer and the instrument is approached as a dialogue where listening and playing are explored simultaneously shaping the musical discourse of the piece.
Émilie Payeur lives and works in Montreal, Canada. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose works often take the form of installations and is also an experimental musician and composer. She holds a master's degree in electroacoustic music composition from the University of Montreal, under the supervision of Robert Normandeau. She is now studying psychology at UQAM (Montréal). She has presented her work in various places including Eisode (Mtl), OBORO (Mtl), Titanik (Finland), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain), Shiro Oni (Japan), Nagi (Bali) and in various festivals such as FIKA(S) (Mtl), Akousma (Mtl), Sight and Sound (Mtl), Ok là (Mtl), FIMAV (Victoriaville), Radical dB (Spain) Videos Femmes dans le parc (Mtl), WUFF (Winnipeg) and Festival l'Oeil from Oodaaq (France). Her work has notably been rewarded by the Robert Fleming Prize (Canada Council for the Arts), the “OBORO New Media Creation Grant” (Mtl) and by the International Music Competitions of Bourges (France). We can hear her playing in Dokter Gig and the gamelan ensemble Giri Kedaton as well as in other collaborations. Her music has been released under different labels such as Kohlenstoff Records (Mtl), Jeunesse Cosmique (Mtl), Rara Avis (Mtl), Mikroclimat (Mtl), Paitapes (Finland) and Takkeherrie Recordings (Netherlands).
Parmela Attariwala has spent her life pursuing a fascination with sound; with its power to evoke
metaphor and captivate the imagination. As a child nurtured in the dual—and often dueling—spirits of Western individualism and South Asian social conservatism, the violin became her unfettered language. Eventually, music and sound became the modes by which she explored the commonalities of human experience and the circumscriptions of ethnocultural particularity.
Parmela holds degrees in violin performance and ethnomusicology (specializing in Sikh devotional music and Canadian cultural policy, respectively). In addition to performing traditional Western art music, she is dedicated to engaging in art that reflects the current era: contemporary and genre-bending musics, improvisation, and interdisciplinary creation. Parmela has released three critically acclaimed Attar Project albums that combine the virtuousity of Western strings with South Asian rhythm and form. She has also worked extensively—as composer, musician and movement artist—with choreographers across a range of disciplines, in particular bharata-natyam, butoh and contact.
In 2019, after twenty-five years in Toronto, Parmela moved to the west coast—to be near family, and to experience the place where her grandfather was brought as a child labourer over a century earlier. She continues to live an eclectic musical life, while also being deeply engaged in advocating for equity and ethics in Canadian musicking. In 2021, Parmela co-founded Understory, an interdisciplinary network and creation platform for Canadian improvising artists. https://understorysound.ca Her recent creative work includes collaborations with: Sujit Vaidya (Sacred Sacrilegious dance film); Peter Morin, Ayumi Goto and the Esker Foundation (sound installations); and Marion Newman/Calgary Opera (Namwayut opera).
Cecilia Lopez is a composer, improviser and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in New York. She works across the media of performance, sound, installation; often through the creation of electronic sound devices and systems.
Her work has been performed and exhibited at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Argentina), Center for Contemporary Arts (Vilnius, Lithuania), Ostrava Days Festival 2011 (Czech Republic), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, Norway), the XIV Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) and MASSMoCA, MATA Festival 2012, Experimental Intermedia, Fridman Gallery, Roulette Intermedium, Issue Project Room and Lincoln Center ( United States). She was a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2015 and has participated in various international residency programs including Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida, US) , Rupert Residency (Lithuania), Ostrava Days Institute (Czech Republic), Harvestworks (NYC) and Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn, NY).
Grants and awards include a New York State Council for the Arts Individual project grant sponsored by Harvestworks, the Media Arts Grant (MAAF) for Individual Artists from the New York State Council for the Arts in partnership with Wave Farm, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the Jerome Foundation and Roulette Intermedium Commission, NYSCA Woman’s Fund in Music and the MacCracken Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University.
As an improviser she has performed with Zeena Parkins, Ingrid Laubrock, Gerald Cleaver, Brandon Lopez, Joe Moffett, Wenchi Lazo, Barbara Togander among others. In 2019, Lopez curated the intermedia festival Folly Systems co-produced by Roulette Intermedium and Outpost Artists Resources that featured 11 international artists. Past collaborators include Ingrid Laubrock, Zeena Parkins, Carmen Baliero, Aki Onda, John Driscoll and Carrie Schneider. She holds an MFA in Music/Sound from The Milton Avery School of the Arts Bard College and an MA in composition from Wesleyan University. She is currently a PhD Candidate in composition at the GSAS at NYU University.
