Ida

Magda Stawarska-Beavan

Magda Stawarska-Beavan’s sound piece Ida uses fragments of Gertrude Stein’s novel of the same name, focusing on the first part of the book in which the protagonist, Ida, is geographically restless; she constantly tries to rest as she moves from place to place.

‘She was saying, yes yes I like to be sitting. Yes I like to be moving’

As the listener is presented only with snippets of the novel, which is already itself a modernist classic, there is an opportunity to project your own narrative, drift off, come into a stage of daydreaming.

The soundscape is composed of field recordings from Bologna, Pisa and La Spezia, recorded with binaural microphones whilst the artist wandered through the city, allowing the listener to share her experience of dreaming about the past and drifting into the future.