Radical cartography has never sounded so sweet!

Charming Hostess explores sense of place in the lives of Natalia and Leone Ginzburg, famous for their intellectual brilliance and resistance to Mussolini’s fascist state. This project is a musical map of the Ginzburgs, setting their writings on place, and evoking their lives in Turin, Abruzzo, and Rome—the places that sustained them emotionally, spiritually, and politically. The sonic palette of the Ginzburg Geography draws from Italian regional traditions, anti-fascist songs, and Italian Jewish liturgy. In concert form, the Ginzburg Geography is a music performance; in its final form it will be an immersive installation. This intimate iteration of Charming Hostess will include Jewlia Eisenberg (Charming Hostess director and composer), Marika Hughes (Bottom Heavy, Two Foot Yard) and Brandon Seabrook (Seabrook Power Plant, Ben Allison) with special guests Jeremiah Lockwood (Sway Machinery) and Ariela Morgenstern (Flashdance).

Charming Hostess works at the intersection of voice, text and diaspora consciousness.

Led by founder Jewlia Eisenberg, they have released four CDs on Tzadik’s Radical Jewish Culture series including Sarajevo Blues, which sets Bosnian resistance poetry, and Trilectic, a look at the political-erotic world of Walter Benjamin. They often work in immersive installation—making hybrid spaces that incorporate music performance, visitor participation, and experimental ritual. Recent installations include Teraphim (Meridian, 2012) on household gods; and The Bowls Project (YBCA 2010) on Babylonian women’s amulets. Jewlia and Charming Hostess have been visiting artists at CalArts, MIT, and UCLA, where they taught on the boundary lands holding music, spirit and critical theory. Their music has been curated into the Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF and the Museum of Peace in Uzbekistan; they have performed from the ZeroOne Bienialle to the Sarajevo Jazz Festival.

Charming Hostess workshops the GINZBURG GEOGRAPHY

What will The Ginzburg Geography installation be like?

The Ginzburg Geography will enliven the space with multiple forms of cartography. It features maps you can listen to, walk among, and add to. Topographical relief of the Ginzburg sites comes down from the ceiling, up from the floor, and out from the walls, framing the music during performance and allowing room for visitor movement and discovery. In addition, there is a mapping station, with a camera where people can take short videos of themselves sharing their own geography of sustaining places. Loops of these visitor-participant videos are projected in the space, adding a contemporary cartography to the mix. The experience of visiting the Ginzburg Geography will be one of both individual particularity and communal connection. Visitors encounter the sustaining geography of the Ginzburgs, of people from their own communities, and they may share their own. The venue and the participants are activated by this tangle of maps, memory and music performance.

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