Ultima presents Raven Chacon on Stegi Radio

This year, Ultima will present two different events featuring work by the Navajo Nation composer and artist Raven Chacon. Tremble Staves is a large scale performance that will take over the waterfront area around Oslo Opera House, while Journey of the Horizontal People is a chamber piece describing a journey of nomadic peoples through a mythic imaginary landscape.

Chacon’s work asks questions about territory, space, and the human right to exist within it, as well as the forces that work to keep people excluded and divided. His work adopts elements of avantgarde performance art, experimental music, installation and film.

In this audio report, journalist and composer Solveig Sørbø travels to Bødø in northern Norway to meet Chacon before the performance of his Pulitzer Prize-winning work Voiceless Mass (2021) at the city’s cathedral. The concert featured the Arctic Philharmonic and was presented in early June in connection with Chacon’s major solo exhibition, A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak, at Nordnorsk Kustmuseum in Tromsø, which runs until 1 September 2024.

Solveig meets Raven Chacon and hears from Tim Weiss, conductor of the Arctic Philharmonic; Katya García-Antón, Director and Chief Curator of Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum/Davvi Norga Dáiddamusea; Ingvild Maria Mehus, double bassist in the Arctic Philharmonic; and poet Sarah Zahid, who contributes to Tremble Staves in Oslo.

Listen to the episode here.

In collaboration with Stegi Radio. Supported by Bergesenstiftelsen and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union as part of Sounds Now.