A conference-performance-concert devised by Eva Reiter and Karin Harrasser, professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Linz. In the 18th century, strange and magnificent hybrids of baroque and indigenous music began to emerge from the Jesuit missions of the Bolivian Chiquitania. Eupepsia puts this archive to work through a mixed instrumentarium that combines baroque and electric instruments.Intrusion, hybridisation, appropriation, assimilation: a reflection on the long-term effects of colonialism.

The programme develops the motif of eupepsia as a metaphor for and practice of transatlantic relations. Taking an archive of European baroque music in Chiquitos/Bolivia as our starting point, we will sound out modes of appropriation, silencing, projection that were (and remain) in play in encounters between indigenous and European cultural practices. Music was used by the Jesuit missionaries as a means to convert and “civilise”. This modern idea resonates in cultural education strategies until today. But though toxic and destructive, the European disruption of indigenous worlds produced new and fragile worlds, in turn articulated into music. Eupepsia therefore offers hybrids (between baroque and contemporary music, European and New World compositions, text-sound collages), not as solutions or remedies, but as sound-objects to ponder the longue durée of cultural violence.  
Eva Reiter & Karin Harrasser

Eva Reiter & Karin Harrasser