Þóranna Björnsdóttir

Thoranna Björnsdottir studied music from an early age. After doing a final exam in classical piano she immediately turned to the field of contemporary sound and art. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, Thoranna has worked as a video and performance artist in the electroacoustic field; working with different media she realizes her work through film, performances and installations.

Thoranna has received good regard for her composition and performances. Her work has been broadcasted by the National Broadcasting Service in Iceland and she has performed at concerts and festivals in Iceland and abroad.

Working in Circolo:

While staying at the residency I will work with the Italian composer Federico Placidi who lives and works in Rome. Our aim is to develop further a project we are doing together called Lucid and release an album as a result.

About Lucid:

Thoranna and Federico aim to bind together two different geographical and cultural domains. These two geographical constraints, produce, different human beings, and the music we produce is a dialogue between two souls which are trying to unify both vision, aesthetics, and purposes. It is like a marriage between the sky and the earth. Federico is developing an algorithmic system in order to sonify data from earth movement gathering them from the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica in Rome.

Our interest is to merge two different views of nature, one based on physical contact, experience and emotional relationship, and the other observed and represented as numerical data, and scientific observation; to connect and transform a visceral, tactile and transcendental experience of natural phenomena and their representation in the numerical (almost Platonic) domain. The data will be sonified using both electronic medium and musical notation for double bass.

The results of the project will be presented in the theatre space in Trastevere in Rome http://www.teatroinscatola.it/ where we will perform our work together.