Chi di Ebere

Info

• Title : Chi di Ebere

• Year : 2023.

• Medium :Multichannel sound installation, Vinyl Record.

• Duration : Variable.

Details

Chi di Ebere (God is merciful) is a multichannel sound-and-light installation exploring mourning, loss and the cultural forms through which grief is expressed, shared and carried collectively.

The work emerged from a personal experience of loss and turns towards Igbo traditions of mourning as a way of thinking through grief beyond the individual. Within these traditions, death is accompanied by forms of gathering, singing, chanting, remembrance and ceremony. Sound becomes part of the social and ritual structure through which loss is acknowledged and shared within the community.

The installation unfolds through multiple sonic tracks. A cappella voices perform Igbo mourning songs, drawing on the collective and ceremonial role of song within practices of grief and remembrance. Alongside these vocal works is an electronic composition infused with field recordings of burial rites, including chants performed by an elder. These distinct sonic registers – mourning song, ritual voice, field recording and electronic composition – occupy the installation together, creating different ways of encountering grief through sound.

Rather than reproducing a burial ceremony, Chi dị Ebere draws from these musical and ritual forms and reconfigures them within a contemporary spatial installation. Voice, electronic sound, field recording, light and architecture create an environment that moves between intimacy and collectivity, inherited practice and contemporary transformation.

The work considers grief not simply as a private emotional experience, but as something given form through shared cultural practices. Mourning songs and ritual chants carry knowledge, memory and ways of relating to loss across generations, while their presence within the installation opens a space for reflecting on how such traditions continue to live, shift and acquire new meanings in the present.

In Chi dị Ebere, listening becomes a way of moving through these different registers of mourning: the collective voice of song, the situated traces of ritual, and the abstraction of electronic composition. Together, they create a space in which grief is encountered not as a single state, but as a layered experience shaped by memory, community, ritual and time.

More than an elegy, Chi dị Ebere creates a space for listening to grief as both a personal and collective experience. Through mourning songs, ritual voices and contemporary composition, the work reflects on the ways memory, cultural knowledge and practices of remembrance are carried forward through sound.

A vinyl edition of Chi dị Ebere extends the work beyond the installation space, offering a more intimate mode of listening while preserving the relationship between the vocal works and the electronic composition.

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