OTUCHA COLLECTIVE

“IMAGINING FUTURES THROUGH SOUNDING TOGETHER” AN INTERVIEW WITH THE OTUCHA COLLECTIVE

KAJET JOURNAL

Hi Ola, hello Bua, it’s so nice to have you here with us today. With regards to the intersection between senses (triggered by food and beyond) and the sonic landscapes that you are creating, we wonder how they become practices of care, with one universal dream in front of us: how do we care for and devise a better world? Would you elaborate on how you are developing this with the work you are doing as the Otucha Collective?

OLA

Yes, it’s a beautiful point. Together with Bua, Ewa, Miu, and Julia, we started as a collective, and although for each of us the group was crystallising in different ways, from the very beginning our gathering was very much about self-care. Of course, each of us had different relations with singing and sound in general, and we came from different backgrounds. (Paulina) Miu was the one who was practising for most of her life and she called us: “hey, I want to gather and sing”, and the first time we met it was a few days before the Russian invasion in Ukraine. It quickly evolved into a more conscious need of using sound and singing in order to heal, to call for support and to support.

BUA

I think that healing happens through senses and bodies: how they receive this healing is not necessarily cognitive, it’s not rational, but it’s very much based in the body. This idea of imagining radical futures—and how we talk about it oftentimes and how it can just get in our heads that we have to invent something—is a very rational way of thinking. Imagining these futures can happen through our sounds, through our bud tastes, and this may already break this Cartesian spell of separation. 

When you’re speaking about the food and the sound, I’m just back from a gathering of the New Visions’ Community,which I am part of. And whenever we were eating, there was a soundtrack happening. It’s like this moment of silence when the food is arriving and everybody’s like, “mmm”. And all the moaning and the joy of reconnecting almost sounds like an eating-orchestra that is performing right there. It’s really beautiful, and so sexy somehow, to have this constant moaning. So, building on what Ola was saying, on our path of coming together, the five of us formed a space of grounding, empowering, and healing for ourselves. The first steps were not intended to heal the world; on the contrary, we gathered in order to connect deeply and what came out of it, is for me one of the most radical healing spaces, a portal of sounding together. 

KAJET JOURNAL

What about your backgrounds, how do they inform this?

BUA

As a creature educated in the West, I am very much connected with my thinking brain, thinking about feelings, so naturally this space of sounding and of becoming a sound myself was both liberating and enabling me to feel the whole body. This is something that allows me to talk about care but also process feelings and digest emotions.

OLA

For me, this was also one of the most radical and transformative therapeutic processes. It was natural for us that we created a female circle, where we generated a safe space for each of us to throw in what was there to be thrown, what was there to be shared, and to listen to one another. It really came out very, very naturally, which was extremely beautiful. And, with time we collectively created—in a smooth, sensual, and body-grounded way—tools for co-working and co-being. 

KAJET JOURNAL

This is such a fascinating, hybrid way through which individual and collective dimensions intertwine and how these practices of care or taking care of each other (while taking care of oneself) happen, right? 

OLA

We all come from Poland and met in Berlin. So also there is this really strong connection of a shared mother tongue, shared sister tongue. And because we wanted to work with Eastern European traditional singing practices, this was another layer for us as migrants: to find a connection with our roots, our past, and our ancestral lines. I used to be a very quiet person, I felt that I was always holding the silence in my body. Sometimes I felt it’s not even my own but the silence of my mother or my grandmother. This is also a topic for me as an artist: to try to understand what silence means and if and how it can be inherited. Working with the voice in this embodied way helped me feel that I’m able to own my voice, to use it at its fullest power. It’s then when I realised that this resonated with other parts of my functioning, of being around people and daring to take space and give voice to my inner self.

KAJET JOURNAL

As you started this discussion about a shared language and pasts, this can be possibly extended further across the borders of the nation-state. There is a kind of sonic eastern—or Slavic, however we want to call it—heritage, right? One which is inherently collective. Ancient Romanian singing customs come to mind (and now that we say this out loud, we are sure this is not just Romanian) that operate as vernacular mechanisms rooted in folk and oral tradition. You add new lyrics, you change the lines, you change the tune a bit, you pass on the work to the next generation, and then you have this fascinating process through which the original work ends up being transformed across decades and centuries. How does this work in your practice? 

BUA

Thank you for exposing this aspect of a song as a living creature. We met with Miu back in 2020, when in response to, at the time, threat to a full abortion ban in Poland, we organised a pro-choice singing protest. Some of the songs were traditional Eastern European. Many of them reproduced patriarchal values, and there was a moment when you realise, “no, no, this line is really bad”. So, why not change it into something else? Adapting the songs to the needs that we are having right now while still believing in their power and still knowing that us singing them together is so incredibly powerful. 

At the same time, I’m thinking about how songs live in different contexts. These songs were created to be sung in the community. It’s something that lives with us, a sensation that is so powerful. Another conversation that we are having is how to queer these songs, because oftentimes they are, on the narrative level, reproducing things that we do not agree with. And this is especially the case when we talk about intergenerational healing and female circles, and how much healing from patriarchal violence is needed. I’m speaking for myself but also for my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother…

Ola already shared that we started meeting just before the Russian invasion in Ukraine, and many of us met in a project called “Who Would Have Thought That The Snow Falls?” that brought songs from eastern Ukraine. Some of these songs live in our bodies because we’re singing them at rehearsals and performances so much. For one demonstration we co-organised in Berlin, we literally sang one song, Zelenaya Visnja, for an hour. And there were plenty of people at Hermannplatz who joined us. This song is very old, but it’s here, in this very moment, in this very context, where we all feel heartbroken, but at the same time this space of being together and sensing and feeling is incredibly powerful.

KAJET JOURNAL

It’s curious how sounds, upon duplication, become this kind of mantra. Their strength comes through repetition, which is not the case with other media or formats, which when duplicated, lose power. And building on this, because you both mentioned at some point that the future is in the back of your minds, this idea of ‘futurism fatigue’ comes to mind, where we are constantly told that the future has already been planned, has already been decided, we can’t do much to change it. What you said about the fact that we need to change the way we imagine the future is really interesting. To be less rational and much more experimental. Can we see it that way? 

OLA

Apart from the fact that songs are transformed across generations, they also travel, they do not know borders: the same songs or similar ones can be found in eastern Ukraine or Poland. I think this is crucial in how we think about possible futures: how to come together and create relations that are actually based on deep togetherness. In our performances, workshops or when we gather with different groups of people, being with our voices really gives us this feeling of creating a temporal community. 

BUA

I love what you said about this temporal community. And building on your question, I actually have a feeling that we are all the time imagining ourselves the future. I find it a very pressing conversation because we are facing the end of the world as we know it. With this, I’m thinking about the value of imagination and how it’s boxed in a certain way of what’s possible for us to imagine or not. By reconnecting with our more than human kin, or listening to a non-human authority, while letting go of this very Cartesian rationality, we can recalibrate our bodies and our very nervous systems. And I’m thinking about how capitalism lives in our nervous systems too, how we are used to certain procedures. I see this space as a place where we can synchronise, attune with each other in a very soft and gentle way.

KAJET JOURNAL

To shift the discussion into the practical realm: how do you actually find these songs? Do you know them already? Do you do some research and try to dig for new ones?

BUA

What we love the most is improvising. We of course work with the structure that enables us to both feel safe and improvise. 

OLA

Paulina, who initiated the collective, has been working with these traditions for many years, and she holds and embodies a big archive of traditional songs. So at the beginning her research was our main resource. Now when we travel to different places we very often bring back songs with us. Recently together with Bua and a group of people we were on a research trip of the project “Doom Mood” by Dorota Michalak and Maud Buckenmeyer in the Białowieża forest on the borderland between Poland and Belarus where we were meeting ladies from the village of Dobrowoda, who were singing for us and we were singing for them.

BUA 

These encounters are really beautiful. I also believe that the process of gathering songs is getting more intentional. What I personally love about Otucha is that it’s not easy to put it in a box, fit it into something very simple. We are not a singing band, we are rather a singing collective that also hosts workshops, creates performances, works with theatre performances, and plays. 

OLA

I personally really like it because each of us has different backgrounds and practices. For instance, Miu is also a music therapist, Ewa is a tantra teacher, Julia’s been singing since forever, also has different experiences with choirs, and Bua, who’s an incredible facilitator and holistic anti-discrimination trainer. I am a sound artist. And, somehow, this was always our strength, that each of us puts her experience into the collective. 

KAJET JOURNAL

What you’re describing resembles some sort of sonic archive, but with a twist. Because there is a paradox: while live performances are, of course, traditionally limited to time and space, at the same time with this kind of perpetual search for new material (and then with the improvisation on top of that) you give these songs a certain permanence. So, how do you position your efforts, in between this archaeological act of digging and safeguarding a heritage and, at the opposite end, improvising and building on existing tunes or even starting from scratch in terms of composition? 

BUA

We want to actualise some of the songs, to bring them in the here and now. So it’s not about archiving and keeping them as in a skansen almost. Digging into our past to heal our present and future, many of these songs are centuries old and we open them up as local mantras or songs that help us reconnect with the spirits and understand this deep time, as well as move beyond the contemporary way of thinking about time itself. So I’m also thinking about how archaeological practice and documentary practice can put in stone things that are very alive and very moving. 

For instance, we are working now on a performance in Podlasie, where the Polish government decided to build a wall between Belarus and Poland. There are 200 kilometres of wall that are blocking the movement of people (mostly refugees) and animals. We were there at the beginning of June and did a short sound intervention. It was a very powerful intervention, also with a confrontation with border guards, that brought us to think about a song and singing as a sound protection for people that may need to move, thinking about distracting border guards, etc. And I don’t know if you know this song, Wade in the Water, which I learned this summer in Virginia in the US. Enslaved folks sang it to give the people that were escaping a signal to hide in the water because the colonisers were coming with dogs that could sniff them: “Wade in the water / Wade in the water, children / Wade in the water God’s gonna trouble the water”. This makes me think about parallel stories, how some of them repeat themselves, and how we can learn from other’s struggles. So, it’s not necessarily archiving as an act of placing something on a shelf and leaving it there, but thinking how these stories feed us with ideas that enable us to connect with a broader ecosystem. 

KASIA

Can I maybe throw in one question? And I have to say it comes from a very personal place, being Polish. I don’t know if there’s an answer to it at all, but because you talked about healing, care and self-care, and on the other hand this question of being Slavic, that I am personally very attracted to but at the same time I think in all our contexts it has this dark side because it’s at the same time used by people who do not share our values at all. And I’m wondering, with this kind of movement towards healing, how to deal with the plurality that is sometimes ugly and difficult. I’m also thinking about this because I’m now working in Poland. We all live in an Eastern European diaspora, and this in itself is a privilege from which we can connect to the heritage in a different way. But then, with the ongoing polarisation, and for instance the anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland, how can we imagine plural futures where people who are radically different from us also find their place? So how do we confront these things that are complicated and troubled? I cannot escape this perhaps more pessimistic part of myself that is too aware of the hostility: do you consider it at all? Do you have experiences with such confrontations that are not immediately available for healing or even care?

OLA

Thank you for this question, Kasia. I don’t know if this is the solution, but a way for me is to think on a small scale, rather than big one. Of course, it’s super difficult, but I’m also thinking that there are people who may seem to think radically differently than us, but they actually don’t. They are in different situations, having different perspectives and needs that we need to somehow understand. This reminds me of one of our trips to the Białowieża forest in June: two elderly singers from Dobrowoda were reluctant to meet us at first. Of course, they got used to people from the outside visiting them, asking for songs, but people grew tired, are fearful of newcomers, of the war, of the militarisation of the area. But still, they met with us, we sang together, and it was a beautiful moment. I guess, from my side, it’s about how to focus on the little encounters that we have and how we can actually listen to one another without acknowledging that we are radically different from the beginning because that would make a conversation impossible.

BUA

I’m just so grateful for this question, Kasia, also because I also work in Poland and in Eastern Europe and the rise of fascism is heartbreaking. In this autumn’s elections in Poland, there are certain narratives that are being weaponised. And queer and trans folks, as well as migrants and refugees became most targeted in the political narrative. I’m thinking about how we can re-appropriate certain things, and I say this as a person who sings Slavic songs and wants to reclaim them and use them in the way I want. And I say it as a queer person who wants to re-appropriate the family and take it and make it mine, instead of leaving it in the hands of right-wing politicians who create a certain idea of what family is. Because I also have a family. I will create it the way I need and want to. I’m thinking about these spaces where we can not give up. I think that this requires the courage of not shying away, of using these narratives or picking them up and thinking about them in an expanded way, with more feeling... And when moving to Germany, I only realised that Nazi Germans were also using singing and being together, and all that. That’s why I was told that Germans don’t sing anymore. And that’s really scary to see how we can use the same tools for different reasons, and how they can be misused and abused. 

I’m thinking about the polarisation that you’re talking about, and coming back to the questions “what’s rational?”, “what’s sensual?”, and “what’s beyond the rational?”, I believe that the spaces we are creating help us liberate ourselves from our armors and the beliefs that our perspectives are the only valid ones. Part of my work outside of Otucha is related to reconnection and exploring other ways of being together and drawing from folks that work with indigenous people. There is a hypothesis that the depth of our crisis is not because we have different values but because of how we are in the world. And I’m thinking about how these spaces that we are creating help us come together without this preconception of I'm not going to like you because you voted PiS (Law and Justice Party). I live in a family in which people do vote PiS and say it in front of me, believing that this is the right way to act. So I’m thinking about how to soften these very hard edges that we are having against each other as we inhabit this planet and get a little bit out of this logical need of coherence, you know? There can be a bit more mess, a bit of seeing ourselves in each other. And I think this is my hope. 

KAJET JOURNAL

It is ours too, exactly. We also feel we don’t want this conversation to end. I think we just warmed up for the first hour and now it’s really warm indeed.

BUA

Let’s never stop.

This interview is also featured in the print publication that accompanies the performative dinner hosted by Tanzfabrik in October 2023 (tickets available here). Departing from the intersection of Eastern Europe’s many pasts and futures, “Feast of Futures: Easternfuturism in Art, Food, and Gathering” explores the possibilities of an interwoven narrative space, examined through the means of sharing food and stories. A journey into Eastern Europe’s futures unfolds through a three-course dinner featuring regional cuisine and family recipes, paired with food, spirits, games, and an artistic programme.

Otucha Collective is a Berlin-based vocal ensemble of female vocal artists, activists, and social workers with an immigrant background. Otucha places their interest in explorations of healing & empowering qualities of the human voice. They mainly work with vocal traditions of rural areas of Eastern Europe and somatic practices. They do performative and public interventions, offering workshops and holding safe spaces for sharing experience of a deep, transforming togetherness in collective sound flow. Otucha are: Paulina Miu Kühling, Agnieszka Bułacik, Ewa Brokos, Julia Legieżyńska, Agnieszka Kucharska, Dorota Michalak, Ola Zielińska. 

Main image: Otucha Collective, photographed by Kasia Sekuła.