An ode to a river, a parrot, a woman

What is the sound of a poetry work emerging from a fascinating, haunting, remote (for the poet) territory?

A reverberation, a story, a journey within a journey, moving through spaces and beings. Awe and gratitude for merging voices temporally scattered. An original 55 second recording, an Indigenous woman calling to a parrot on the Purricha river, a diary, two students – Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith - their anthropological research and a summer trip to Chocó Department, Colombia, 1965.

We hear therefore we feel, in a process of listening to archived sounds, screeching ghosts, deep listening into ourselves, with body and soul, listening across species and time, listening against, as a political stance of resistance. Calling and answering to connect and become memory. And then receiving, page by page/jpeg by jpeg, the 1965 journal written by our travellers, and zooming and corresponding with a fellow artist who by chance is an anthropologist, Colombian, learning with Chocó’s riverine communities and she is amazing.

Walking. My Pitch (born a dog in this life), my Zoom H6 and JRF hydrophone, daily interviews with our friends, the Bacchiglione river, the mesmerising bee-eaters, herons, cormorants, crows and a rooster at the foot of the Euganean Hills (Italy). Writing and accompanying lines and rhymes on a modern lyre, the Lyra8 organismic synth, like a modern poet. For words and their soundscape are just part of a shared macro-micro-layered ecosystem, as the experience you are about to have.

Poem: Ode to a River a Parrot a Woman
we hear you 
loud, raucous shriek 
screet screet screet
frequency of kin
divine communing, lora
screech in the air, call to us
we are calling to you

gurgles & burrows through 
the river, Purricha
speak of your fiery thirst
burst & boost the uncanny across
this land, a marsh-threshold 
gold they mined, & still
stories gold unfolds 

a butterfly idling, sidling, gliding*
chew & spit & make chicha 
gentle woman, wife of Narciso 
your mirror code
is calling to us
emerge & interrupt our noise
your voice persists aglow

throughout the moist forest
you too wear feathers
precious gold-maize plumage
ancestral heritage, resist 
restore bonds, your sound 
echoes centuries of struggle
we hear you
*line from the 1965 diary (page 17)

Spanish spoken word 
te oímos/ llámanos/te estamos llamando/te oímos/fermento en la boc/fermento colectivo/fermento de reexistencias de ríos/llamados de ríos a traves de loros/ es un canto/ actos mimeticos de reciprocidad/te oimos/llamanos/te llamamos/sonidos portales a otros/tiempos a otros universos/memorias ribereñas/vidas en reexisntencia/quién oye a quién/quién llama y quién/chicha ferment/aguas compartidas/de boca en boca/aguas que fermentan y alimentan los cuerpos/cuerpos de agua cuerpos de río/ríos de oro ríos de sangre/ríos que son testigos de esclavitud y violencia colonial/supervivencias sónicas/portal

Composition:
Poem: written and read by Ilaria Boffa
Spanish spoken word: written and read by Colombian anthropologist and artist Elizabeth Gallon Droste
Soundscape: field recording taken by Ilaria Boffa inside the Bacchiglione river and at the ‘Anello dei Colli Euganei’ in Padua-Italy w/ JRF hydrophone and Zoom H6 recorder. Intro and outro, Lyra8 organismic synthetiser, by Ilaria Boffa. 

Acknowledgements:
My grazie from the bottom of my heart to the Purricha river, that parrot and all the birds in Chocó department, to Narciso’s wife and all the Indigenous people mentioned in the diary, and to Jonathan (1945–1968) and Richard (1945-2023).
Special thanks to artist, anthropologist and researcher Elizabeth Gallon Droste (https://elizabethgallondroste.net).

Chocó woman calling a parrot reimagined by Ilaria Boffa.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds