the naked projects
The next topic I’m going to work on in a series of different projects is nakedness in it's social, cultural, psychological and sexual aspects. Lately I’ve been observing, reflecting and thinking a lot about our approach and our relationship to the naked body in different contexts and society’s changing rules and etiquettes since I was a child. I’m interested in how our dealings with nakedness is mirroring our problems with gender roles, diversity, sexuality, aging, (self) acceptance and some other pressing topics of our society. First step was the short story Entpuppung I’ve been invited to write for the anthology Wechselhafte Jahre about the life of women over 50, which was published by Leykam Verlag. Now I’m planning on collaborations with different artists in various art forms, aiming to unleash a change of perspective and perception.
More information coming soon ...
painted music: improvisations in sound and color
Ruth Cerha aka Cassia C: Klavier
Eva Wolfram-Ertl: Malerei
During the hardest part of the Pandemic, artist Eva Wolfram-Ertl and me got the chance to work in a huge old vacant apartment as an interim use. We decided to explore the interplay between improvised painting and music. We met every Tuesday morning for 3 hours, she working on canvas with oil, me playing the piano. No plans, no concepts, no rules.
In half a year 12 big paintings and 16 hours of music emerged, in an amazing process of synergy that revealed a lot about the core of improvised art to us. The artwork and the music are most closely connected and independent at the same time.
I recorded everything I played with a small ZOOM recorder, all one take improvisations, with the surrounding sounds in the background of Eva handling her working tools, birds singing outside, the garbage truck going by etc., which brings the space as an important part of the work to perception for the listener.
Album out now for streaming and download on all platforms.
Look for Cassia C: Painted Music
Vinyl available in a limited edition – direct distribution only.
Please contact me!
Cassia C
musical poetry
Since 2018 I've been working with poetry in German and English on the basis of free musical improvisation. With a certain
poem in mind I record one take impro pieces on the piano, then work my voice over it in different ways. The poems are partly my own, partly from poets I adore, female only. This is because they speak to me more than male poets, but there is a statement in it too: Poetry in general is a marginalized literary form, and the one written by woman is even more overlooked. So I'm hoping to draw more attention to female poetry through my music.
Cassia C is my alias as a musician. Since lately you can find some of my music by this name on streaming platforms and digital music stores. There is more coming soon.
Follow me on Spotify.
Hüpf ins Buch
Hüpf ins Buch is an artistbook created 2017 by the artists Manuela Tober and Tatjana Zinner in a limited edition of 12 books, each handmade, signed and numbered, as part of their project KUNST GEHT HEIM. Spiele für das Leben. It is meant to be an inspiration and jump start for people to further work on it. In 2021, in the middle of the Corona crisis, Manuela invited me to an artist's playround edition. I was the first to jump into the book and I worked on it for a month before I passed it on to the next artist, Michaela Lehmann.
With this playround we wanted to set a sign for artistic activity and connection of people through arts overcoming Corona limitations, social distancing and lockdown frustration. The book is still in process, wandering from artist to artist, growing in an amazing and always unexpected and unpredictable way.
A series of poems, started spontaneously in summer 2020 on my way to bed into a A5-notebook I had bought a few days before. Without a thought I took a pencil and wrote down words that came to my mind in this very moment, without any paragraphs or punctuation marks, always going till the end of the line, even if the word was not finished.
On the next morning I was surprised by the outcome. I liked the form and decided to stick to it. Personal sensitivities came up in these poems as well as observations and concern about the state of the world and it's people. The series is still growing and morphing, like in a workshop, seemingly being a shelter for my wondering mind, for feelings of dismay, confusion and impuissance.
Six of the poems were published in June in the Show Lyric 2021 special edition of the literature magazine SALZ.
You can order it here.
In summer 2022 I decided that I didn't like to bury those poems in a book but wanted them to live out there in public space, so I had them printed on stickers and started to put them all over Vienna wherever they seemed to draw attention.
This is an ongoing project you can follow on Instagram: @urgentpoetry
