Songs to Sound Worlds: I Eat Here

<p><em>I Eat Here</em> by Tessa Mars is the first episode of the new podcast series <em>Songs to Sound Worlds, Stories to Rewrite Them: On Gender, Storytelling, and Myth</em>, based on the autumn 2022 symposium with the same title. Tessa Mars was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In her painting and performance practice she proposes storytelling and image-making as transformative strategies for survival, resistance, and healing. Her work is centered around Tessalines, her hybrid alter ego based on the leader of the Haitian revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines; through her, Mars investigates gender, history, tradition, and narrative.</p> <p>The podcast series <em>Songs to Sound Worlds, Stories to Rewrite Them: On Gender, Storytelling, and Myth</em> emerges from the autumn 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. It features talks and performances by Jumana Emil Abboud, Bani Abidi, Christian Campbell, Astrit Ismaili, Acaye Kerunen, Tessa Mars, and Kara Springer.</p> <p>To critically and virtuosically address the world from mythic and counterhegemonic positions means to face colonial histories and neocolonial realities, as well as their denial of ancestral and speculative ways of perceiving and shaping that very world. The symposium <em>Songs to Sound Worlds</em> was devoted to artists and thinkers whose work addresses the importance of retelling and reinterpreting stories and myths that regard identity and gender with all their ecological and spectral entanglements intact. Such myths often transcend colonial binaries, offering life-generating languages that employ fiction and fantasy, poetry and song, which predate the systems imposed by hetero-modernity and its patriarchization of our most foundational stories.</p>