Monday July 10, 2017, 24:00 on ERT2
Sound Cage: A Portrait of Katalin Ladik, 2015, Hungary, 60 min.
Director: Kornél Szilágyi (Igor Buharov)
In Sound Cage: A Portrait of Katalin Ladik by Kornél Szilágyi (also known as Igor Buharov), the many languages of Serbian-Hungarian poetess, actress, and visual artist Katalin Ladik come together. There is a language we all understand, of Ladik telling the story of her life. This is interspersed with the language of her poems—words that drift, float, and arrive like water in the bay of Hvar Island, Croatia, from where we see her reciting the words: “Who steps on cinder / under the sky / is gliding. / Our passions burn her / to ashes day by day / and fall into the foam.”
We see the language of Ladik’s body as the main instrument in her performances onstage, in shamanistic gatherings in 1960s Novi Sad, and as a stark yet seductive presence at Happenings. Yet the most exquisite part of her language, of her body, we hear: the voice. It vibrates, shrieks, rotates, comes from the head, the throat, the belly—all the high and low tones manifest in Ladik’s great instrument.
From the early 1970s, Ladik transformed “found” materials such as sewing instructions, newspaper clippings, and computer circuits into visual scores for musical performance. She “reads” these scores with every part of her voice, giving breath to the everyday references in the collages. In doing so, Ladik turns image into poetry into performance into music.
But she always returns to her first love—language. The words of her life and her poetry, the articulations of her body, and the infinitesimally complex language of her voice.
—Hendrik Folkerts, Curator documenta 14