ontdek
Writing for voice is always a personal and profound experience for me. The choice of a text is the very heart of the creative process: it is through words that I begin to conceive the music. To speak about cuerpo desierto, therefore, it is important to share something about the creative process that led to this piece and the text I chose.
When Cappella Amsterdam and Geoffroy Jourdain invited me to compose a piece around the Stabat Mater, in Italian or Latin, I immediately felt an inner resistance to the figure of the Virgin Mary. Although the theme of a mother’s suffering for her son deeply moves me, I couldn’t connect with the image of Mary. I have always perceived this figure as silent/absent, a symbol of a specific idea of womanhood—more political than spiritual.
This resistance prompted me to turn my attention elsewhere, to seek another perspective. The concert program conceived by Geoffroy became a precious guide and a source of inspiration along this path. The pieces chosen for the program revolve around Christ’s passion and death, the suffering, but also the transformation—the passage from an earthly body to a universal body. It was a powerful image that led me to explore other bodies, other figures—ancestral, recurring, “open wounds”—but also symbols of strength and outcry.
This is how I came to Susana Chávez, a Mexican poet and activist, brutally murdered in 2011. Susana was killed because she was a woman, a poet, and an activist, in Ciudad Juárez, her hometown, sadly notorious as the city of femicides, where thousands of women have been kidnapped, raped, murdered, and abandoned in the desert, often with the complicity of institutional silence. Susana was a powerful voice against this systemic violence.
I chose her poem Cuerpo Desierto for the strength of its words, which I perceive as powerful and exact, like those of a sacred text. Words that speak of violated and desert bodies, at once pursued and pursuing. Her words seem to anticipate and narrate her own death, resonating with a force I could not ignore. They express anger and resignation, vulnerability and determination. I couldn’t imagine them in any language other than Spanish—Susana’s language.
Within the poem, I decided to include the phrase Ni una menos (in the text marked with a [*])—Not one less—a phrase attributed to Susana that has become a global motto, a call for action against gender-based violence. This phrase weaves its way into the beginning and the end of the piece, threading itself between the words cuerpo and desierto, as a memory, a prayer, and an admonition to the “desert”.
Somehow cuerpo desierto is my Stabat Mater, where the one on the cross and the one beneath coincide.
Silvia Borzelli, 2024 door D. Calderone.
liedtekst
Cuerpo Desierto
Algunos cargan mi cuerpo desierto [*]
tras su espalda
como si fuera el sendero
un día cruzado hacía mí.
Mientras, me mezclo inclemente
con cenizas de todas las calmas
convirtiéndome en mar de tormentas,
de huesos perdidos.
En algo indistinguible,
mitológico,
aún más errante que CRISTO,
que el llanto.
Más insolente que la ceguedad,
(..) más cotidiano que la mano dentro
de la falda infantil,
más prestado que el dinero.
Me convierto en pena clavada
en carne vacía,
en perseguido persiguiéndote,
cavador de gritos,
en habitante
de este cuerpo [*]
desierto.
Susana Chávez Castillo
from Primera Tormenta
Desert Body
Some carry my desert body
on their backs
as if the path
once crossed towards me.
Meanwhile, I mix relentlessly
with ashes of all calms,
turning into a sea of storms,
of lost bones.
Into something indistinguishable,
mythological,
even more wandering than CHRIST,
than weeping.
More insolent than blindness,
(..) more commonplace than a hand inside
a child’s skirt,
more borrowed than money.
I become a sorrow embedded
in empty flesh,
in the pursued pursuing you,
screams’ digger,
a dweller
of this desert
body.
