Sardinian poet and ecologist, Orlanda Sassu, devoted her entire life to recording audio as an archive for the memory of her village and of the language she was afraid to lose.
Writing poems and mutetus (a Sardinian poetic form in the oral tradition), her voice crosses temporal barriers and takes us to the symbolic places of her existence – the river, the village, the sea, the hut built around a secular tree on the sand dunes of Pistis, together with her companion Efisio, a poet himself.
Iolanda, as she was known in her community, relied on the magnetic tapes to travel through time, return to the memories of her past and challenge the possibility of existing in the future, reaching us as a voice that is alive and present.
Iolanda They Call Me By Name was produced as part of the You Are So Sound (YASS!) mentorship program and production grant under the guidance of Rikke Houd and premiered at the 2021 Lucia Festival.