The Million Dollar Contribution of All Mistakes / anora[k]araoke Ep. 5

Join us for an evening of poetry, spoken word, and song to celebrate the launch of The Million-Dollar Contribution of All Mistakes. Since January 2024, poet and author Angélica Freitas has been developing a series of poems centred on the theme of making mistakes, inspired by Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade’s line, A contribuição milionária de todos os erros (The million-dollar contribution of all mistakes, as translated by Odile Cisneros). The fifth edition of anora[k]araoke marks the conclusion of Freitas’s residency at anorak. She will be joined by musician Juliana Perdigão for a performative reading, followed by karaoke hosted by our much-loved Jules Reidy and Judith Hamann.

My work on The Million Dollar Contribution of All Mistakes has taken two directions: one is visual, and the other is auditory. At the beginning of the year, I started a series of drawings and poems, the latter based on the former. I am very shortsighted and wondered how I could use this limitation in my series. What happens when you cannot entirely control what is happening on the page? Does the hand want to follow familiar paths? If I can’t see the page well and have to rely on my memory and the residual sounds of the words, how does that affect my poem? Later in my residency, as I also wanted to explore reading aloud and how sounds can enhance the experience—not only for the audience but also for me as a performer—I designed an improvisational performance with my partner, the musician Juliana Perdigão. She uses a small, battery-operated radio to tune into a live station and, by means of loops and distortions, creates a sound base over which I read. There are a few guidelines to this: I should always read from my newest material, something untested in public, and, whenever possible, I should attempt to sing some of these texts. The act of creation happens again as I try to fit the poem into the sounds and modulate it with my voice, accepting and incorporating mistakes. – Angélica Freitas

anora[k]araoke is a series of events programmed by Judith Hamann and Jules Reidy, exploring community DIY karaoke as a collective performance practice. Each anora[k]araoke session begins with an artistic response to a broad range of ideas encompassing poetics of memory, dedicated amateurism, entanglement with failure, utopian horizons, and how we might build communities, solidarity, resistance, and connection through the party.
Come sing your hearts and hurts out with us.

Angélica Freitas is a Brazilian poet and author known for her explorations of gender, nationality, and high/low culture in contemporary society. Her work includes three books of poetry, including Der Uterus ist so groß wie eine Faust, translated by Odile Kennel and published in Germany by Elif Verlag in 2020. In 2020, she arrived in Berlin with the DAAD Künstlerprogramm and has since made the city her home. In 2024, Angélica was a resident at anorak as part of the program Weltoffenes Berlin.

Juliana Perdigão is a Brazilian composer, performer, producer, singer songwriter, musician and sound artist. She has been performing in stage and studio for over 20 years and dedicates her artistic work to the search of interconnections between sound, words and performance.

Judith Hamann is a composer/performer born in Narrm/Melbourne, and currently based in Berlin. Their work encompasses performance, electro-acoustic composition, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a process based creative practice.

Jules Reidy is a musician based in Berlin. As a soloist, they make weird songs for guitar(s) and electronics. They otherwise play in Sun Kit, the Pitch, Oren Ambarchi’s “Carpe Diem”, as well as in duo projects with Sam Dunscombe, Andrea Belfi and Morten Joh, and lots of other stuff.