PHRIENDS

With “I saw the world collapse and it was only a word”, the artist Hassan Khan developed a vocal composition for five singers – followed by a coda on a mobile phone. The composition is an organic musical structure based on a libretto consisting of seventy words and forty events between the singers. This creates, according to the artist, a mystical modulation, a vaguely remembered moment of collapse, an undefined longing, a search for names and other semi-imaginary conversations.

About the publication:

In “I saw the world collapse and it was only a word”, published on the occasion of his concert in December 11, 2019 at Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Hassan Khan articulates the communal yet individualized feelings of sadness and trouble before they coalesce into larger structures and institutions through a libretto for five vocalists, showing us the fleeting moments of the world as it is collapsing rather than only the dust of its collapse.

The work is characterized by layered fragments that gesture toward a tonality and unity that nearly coalesce, but that dissipate as soon as they emerge. The collapsing word could be anything: the death of a family member; a defeated revolution; a heartbreak. It means something different from one place, one individual, to the next while still existing so broadly that it defines a more communal experience felt across the globe.

A collapse from what? Rather than a doomsday message, it intimates that perhaps the world isn’t really collapsing at all. Instead, Khan poses collapse as an ever-present underlying condition, challenging much contemporary intellectualizing that positions the current moment as somehow peculiar or extraordinary.

Performances at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2018), Albertinum, Dresden (2019), Le Louvre, Paris (2022).

Composition and libretto: Hassan Khan
Performed by PHØNIX16

Link to project