As in all of her work, Isabella Bordoni pays great attention to the compository relationship between lyrics and sound. In her live performance at the digital studio for radio plays RP4 of the Vienna Funkhaus, she creates poetic atmosphere, acoustically as well as visually, by interweaving and intertwining her own voice reciting texts in Italian with original recordings of Ingeborg Bachmann's voice, thus making references and resonances between the languages and voices perceivable.
This vocal texture is accompanied and completed by sounds and music which Angelo Benedetti, Norbert Math, and Rupert Huber composed especially for this piece.

The dramaturgic composition of lighting, slide and video projectors creates a visual, but immaterial space for the live poetry performance.

Reflection in four points (by Isabella Bordoni)

1_For some while now, I have been exceeding lyrical and sonic horizons in my work in order to create, and design poetic, acoustic, and visual spaces. For some time, I have been questioning the philosophical world of thoughts and ideas which is expressed in literature; and for some time I've been looking back at my childhood with a lyrical view. The term childhood alone implies an outcry. This scream is irreparable, as it seems, and history repeats it time and again.

 2_Exceeding things, the state of transition is what I'm interested in.
 
3_Ingeborg Bachmann was born in a borderland - in the south of Carintha in 1926.
Only a few years after the end of World War I, Ingeborg Bachmann is a teen-age witness of the so-called "Anschluss" in 1938, and of the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Years later, she describes the invasion of Hitler's troups in Klagenfurt, the town where she was born, and where she grew up, as "the end of my childhood".

4_"Andante con figure" deals with this end, and this state of transition.
In a poetical way, the border is regarded as the place of transition, not only in a spacial sense, but also according to the times, and the way these changes took place. Borders are repeatedly an issue in Ingeborg Bachmann's work, and they are used as a metaphor for cracks, ruptures, or for illness.
"Andante con figure" leads into an acoustic world in which the sonic space of living (which is the unit of measurement) is a room in a hospital. However, it's a room which opens up to other worlds; not in a claustrophobic way, but - paradoxically - it becomes a vanishing point, a space for preparing for the flight. Words and language exist here, and teen faces appear to inhabit this space. These are faces which look at us anxiously, telling us that continuity and transition are experiences that are inseperably linked to eachother.

This project was produced by ORF Kunstradio in collaboration with the Ingeborg Bachmann Society and supported by the Italian Cultural Institute.