With Forests in Our Mouths
Info
Chapter 7: Echo Ballads II
Format: Performance (35 min)
Dates: 25 Apr 2025, 19:00
Venue: Teaterri Kiisu, Esiintymä Festival, Outokumpu (FI)
Language: Damiá, English, Finnish





“What did we do with the anger? That was hard. We couldn’t put it all on one island, though we did try to break it down bit by bit, piece by piece. It took a long time. It’s taking a long time. Sometimes we sang it away, in the night, out of key, wailing to the moon or to the large disintegrating satellites that careened slowly above our small bony heads.”

Echo Ballads II is a 35-minute live performance and a strange echo of the revolutionary-karaoke exhibition Echo Ballads // Pasián Esba which forms the other component of Chapter Seven of the constellation artwork With Forests in Our Mouths (2024/25). The performance acts as an exploded diagram, dissecting layers and basslines from the karaoke classic Believe (Cher, 1998) — the first hit to ever use auto-tune. The work is built on seven tenets and asks if the words we sing matter & if we can unlock the liberatory potential in our voices by falling out of line and out of tune.






Performance, text, video: ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS
Festival support: Esko Vihava & the Esiintymä Team
Documentation photos: Sofie Keto-Tokoi

Seven Tenets

I. Radical separatist joy

II. Futurity

III. Everything maa-maa

IV. Use the stage

V. Voice as utopian

VI. Exploded drawing

VII. The big reveal


Chapters: ❶ Like Déjà-Vu But The Other Way Around ❷ Thick Time ❸ Remembering Colours ❹ Helialá — a gathering of poems ❺ Palace of Ash & Rain ❻ Speech Community ❼ Echo Ballads // Pasián Esba & Echo Ballads II