Yoshtoyoshto

A live divination with Moving Image, Music and Story

by Peter Mettler, Jeremy Narby and Franz Treichler

2015–18

A filmmaker, a musician and an anthropologist merge their arts in a live alchemical improvisation, feeding off each other in real time, drawing from our shared human existence, saturated with knowledge, sound and image. This three-way fusion mixes hypnotic technologies with oral tradition, transforming and re-contextualizing self-made and collected materials, to engage in a kind of divination of the mediated world’s ‘unconscious.’

Amazonian Yaminahua people say all living beings are animated by yoshi, which are invisible, multifaceted beings. To communicate with yoshi, they sing in an indirect and metaphoric language called “tsai yoshto yoshto”: “language twisting twisting”, or twisted language. Yaminahua people use twisted language to address the multifaceted yoshi beings, because “normal words would crash into them,” whereas twisted words allow you to go in close (but not too close), to circle around them and see them clearly. Here, metaphor is not improper naming, but the only naming possible.

Featuring Peter Mettler (filmmaker), Franz Treichler (musician, The Young Gods), and Jeremy Narby (anthropologist, author of The Cosmic Serpent).

Presented at:

2015 Videoex Festival, Zürich, Switzerland
2016 Théâtre de Vidy, Lausanne, France
2017 Porto/Post/Doc, Porto, Portugal
2018 CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Denmark
2018 Millennium Docs Against Gravity, Warsaw, Poland
2018 Kino Xenix, Zürich, Switzerland

PERFORMANCE AT THÉÂTRE DE VIDY, LAUSANNE, 2017