2023
Performance piece
First shown at the exhibition Contemporary Myths and Artifacts, curated by Coulisse Galley in Stockholm november 2023
Evirato
At the height of it’s popularity in the beginning of the 18th century, around 4000 young boys were castrated annually, as families from poor conditions put their sons through the process in the hope of being lift out of poverty through their success.
At this time castrato singers was not only part of most church choirs in Italy; operas without a renowned castrato in the leading role was considered doomed to fail.
Besides keeping the vocal cords of a child through adulthood, the procedure of castration kept the subject in a constant pre-pubertal state; its bones never hardened and kept growing through their lifetime. Combined with immense vocal training, their rib cages grew unusually large, giving them an unparalleled lung capacity going through a child’s vocal cords resulting in an extremely flexible and virtuous voice that sounded neither like a man’s or a woman’s.
Being praised on an aesthetic level, but socially alienated by their inability to procreate, the castratis position in society was unique - their worth being established solely on their ability to perform. Very few did in fact reach the stardom they were promised, and were often forced into begging and prostitution.
Evirato mimics the voice of the castrato to lament the circumstances that made the voice come into being. Reduced to being desired as an object but disregarded as a societal subject, hormonally caught between childhood and adulthood, promised a success they most times never reached, the in-between state of the castrato is an historical anomaly that reflects integral parts of contemporary liberal capitalism.
Hannes Ferm
At the height of it’s popularity in the beginning of the 18th century, around 4000 young boys were castrated annually, as families from poor conditions put their sons through the process in the hope of being lift out of poverty through their success.
At this time castrato singers was not only part of most church choirs in Italy; operas without a renowned castrato in the leading role was considered doomed to fail.
Besides keeping the vocal cords of a child through adulthood, the procedure of castration kept the subject in a constant pre-pubertal state; its bones never hardened and kept growing through their lifetime. Combined with immense vocal training, their rib cages grew unusually large, giving them an unparalleled lung capacity going through a child’s vocal cords resulting in an extremely flexible and virtuous voice that sounded neither like a man’s or a woman’s.
Being praised on an aesthetic level, but socially alienated by their inability to procreate, the castratis position in society was unique - their worth being established solely on their ability to perform. Very few did in fact reach the stardom they were promised, and were often forced into begging and prostitution.
Evirato mimics the voice of the castrato to lament the circumstances that made the voice come into being. Reduced to being desired as an object but disregarded as a societal subject, hormonally caught between childhood and adulthood, promised a success they most times never reached, the in-between state of the castrato is an historical anomaly that reflects integral parts of contemporary liberal capitalism.
Hannes Ferm