Pamela Z
Pamela Z (b. 1956, US) is a composer, performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. By working with live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Pamela Z’s performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to multi-media works in theatres and concert halls, and, in addition to these, she has created a growing body of installation works using multi-channel sound and video.
Pamela Z has shown work in exhibitions at: MoMA, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs New York; 50th Venice Biennale; 6th Dakar Biennale; Krannert Art Museum, Illinois; The Kitchen, New York; Merkin Hall, New York. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird.
Breathing
2013
Recording of chamber work: voice, processing, and tape, 7 min 13 sec, loop
Courtesy of the artist
Breathing is one movement from the multi-media chamber work Carbon Song Cycle , originally scored for voice and electronics, violin, cello, and percussion. The piece was first performed by composer Pamela Z as a live performance in 2013. Carbon Song Cycle is inspired by the ongoing changes in the Earth’s ecosystems and by the carbon cycle, the process through which carbon is exchanged between all terrestrial life forms and domains.
In relation to the critiques of capitalism’s glorification of work made by Kiluanji Kia Henda and Tiago Mena Abrantes, Pamela Z’s work poses an alternative question: if work does not heal us, what remains? Breathing, the body’s most fundamental rhythm, offers another perspective on survival and opens up possibilities for imagining rest otherwise.