One Song celebrates the power of songs we carry in our hearts and memories, songs that connect us with our heritage. Created by artist Kadir Karababa and commissioned by Counterpoints Arts, the work is on display at the Museum of the Home in London until 5 February 2023.
Kadir says:
“Inspired by my own family story of migration from Eastern Turkey to London, I wanted to make a work about how songs are carried across borders and yet firmly rooted in the place they were first sung.”
“As a child, I remember hearing my grandmother repeat a line from a song over and over again ‘I am on a long and narrow road’. At the time, I was irritated that she only seemed to remember this one line.”
“Years later I realised the significance of the song to her: by singing it, she was transported to the country and home she had left behind. This is the essence of One Song.”
In a series of sessions between April and June 2022 led by Kadir and Ellen Muriel, participating women living in Hackney shared personal stories with each other and contemplated the question, “which one song takes you back to the place you first called home?”
Songs were performed and a selction were filmed in their original languages with English subtitles – allowing the viewer to experience their themes of land, love, and loss.
The work is also collected on the One Song archive website.
To mark the launch of One Song, Counterpoints Arts invited writer Vesna Maric to reflect on the connections between songs and migration. Vesna is the author of Bluebird, a memoir charting her arrival in the UK as a teenage refugee from Bosnia in 1992.
Vesna writes:
On more than one occasion, music has saved my life. Not just any music, but sevdah, the traditional Bosnian song that derives from the Ottoman times and tells the stories of love, death, illness, even comic anecdotes. It sings of life, life in general, and Bosnian life in particular. Ever since I was a little child, I was enamoured with sevdah. I remember a family friend saying that I couldn’t possibly like ‘that music – it’s,’ she said, ‘too demanding for a child.’ Yet I immersed myself in its the melancholy octaves, the vocal warbles, the depth of feeling. Sevdah got me through some of the most difficult events of my life: I once spent hours riding the London underground listening to sevdah, processing a friend’s suicide. I listen to and sing sevdah whenever I feel homesick – for a home that no longer lives anywhere but in that music – when I long to touch the centre of who I am.
