The Yorkshire based multidisciplinary artist will present the findings of a fictional anthropologist who came across an imagined matriarchal community as her first full length release
UK performer, composer and 2019 Oram Award recipient Nwando Ebizie will release her debut album The Swan early next year via Matthew Herbert's label Accidental. Ebizie explains that this video for the lead single “I Seduce” is “found footage” from a matriarchal community existing in an alternate timeline. “An anthropologist has found it”, she explains. “He collects the fragments of [the women's] lives and tries to make sense of their practices. The songs constitute some of the artefacts he has gathered together in his text – his text which for his people is what we would call an album.”
Ebizie's imagined discovery is a community of feminine archetypes – “One of them is the dream of another. One is a mirror. One is Mother and Cord. One is a group – they are divine children”, she says.
The Swan is the first release under Ebizie's own name rather than her alias Lady Vendredi, but doesn't necessarily mark a departure from her previous releases. “This continues my work, begun with Lady Vendredi in mythopoesia”, she declares, “ – creating new mythical narratives with the understanding that myth ‘can be more instructive than history’ (Angela Carter – The Passion of New Eve), especially the corrupted racist history we have to pick our way through.”
Indeed, as with many of the artist's previous works, Haitian Vodou is heavily cited. “I continue on with my research into ritual cultures of the Black Atlantic”, she says. “Since 2013 under the tutorship of Haitian dancer Zsuzsa Parrag (and more recently Karine LaBel), I have researched Haitian Vodou dance and to a lesser extent as a self directed study, music. It is hard to connect with Afro-diasporic ritual practice in an isolated fashion, the way a dancer in a conservatoire only learns the steps of the polka and the musician in his own conservatoire, only the musical notes. It is always necessary to explain a little about Haitian Vodou as the vast majority of people will straight away be thinking of the cliched, exploitation Hollywood version of magical dolls and death spells. Haitian Vodou is one of a set of syncretic Afro-diasporic religions, carried from West Africa by people enslaved and stolen to the Americas. It developed there to such a powerful extent that it is credited as being instrumental in the only successful Black revolution by enslaved peoples.”
“Petwo is a dance form associated with the Haitian Revolution”, she continues, “ – where the enslaved black people overthrew Napoleon’s army. The only uprising of enslaved peoples that led to the forming of a state. It is important to me, as a Black African woman to connect to this incredible moment in history. To revere it. To show respect by embracing it as a living action.”
The Swan is released by Matthew Herbert's Accidental in 2022. Ebizie takes part in Take Me Somewhere Festival on 23 May 2021.
Ebizie took part in Radiophrenia 2021, which is reviewed by Clare Sawers in The Wire 444. Subscribers can read the review via the digital archive.
