O’Tilli

O’Tilli forms part of Donnimaar, Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s ongoing artistic project spanning music, performance and visual art. The album draws on songs and narratives from the oral traditions of West Jutland documented in the nineteenth century by the Danish folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen, including material transmitted by the artist’s great-great-great-great-grandmother Johanne Tygesdatter. Anchored in this ethnographic archive, the work approaches these texts not as historical artefacts but as living material capable of continual transformation.

Rather than reconstructing a traditional repertoire, Kølbæk Iversen develops new musical works from the historical texts. Sung in the original West Jutland dialect and realised for solo voice, choir and strings, the four compositions allow the language itself to shape melody, rhythm and vocal expression. The accompanying Riso-printed songbook reproduces the original texts alongside English translations, making the linguistic source material an integral part of the publication.

The songs evoke a world populated by women, mermaids and other transformative figures whose stories often resist the Protestant, national-romantic framework within which they were collected. Rather than presenting folklore as a fixed cultural inheritance, O’Tilli reveals voices that remain unruly, contradictory and unexpectedly contemporary.

Donnimaar is a shapeshiftress. Throughout the project, historical voices, mythical figures and contemporary musical practice continually pass into one another, allowing the songs to remain in motion rather than settle into historical reconstruction.