Björk - Tabula Rasa
Throughout her fascinating career, Björk has been a dab hand at transformation: a cartoon character, a 3D bear, a robot, a cocoon or winged insect, no creature seems to be able to resist the singer who loves reincarnating herself in all of her incredibly successful music videos. For each of her nine albums, she is reborn as a new character, a new story within a new décor whose foundations she lays through her music, her visuals and her costumes. In her latest opus Utopia, released in November 2017, Björk invited us to her own vision of paradise, a fantastical and feminist world peopled with flutist-flower-women, magical birds and tropical plants. On May 6th this year she began her residency of one month at the Shed, a new hub at the cutting edge of culture and technology located in the heart of Manhattan: there the singer is presenting Cornucopia, “her most elaborate staged concert to date” in her own words, punctuated by the sounds of her latest album as well as other older tracks, rearranged in order to integrate into this brand new tableau. To illustrate this ambitious show, Björk called upon the German digital artist Tobias Gremmler who made all the visuals.
At the first concert of Cornucopia, the public was shown the singer’s new music video, made for the song Tabula Rasa. In this track addressing her own daughter, Björk uses the example of her own broken couple to encourage women to stand up, make a clean sweep of the past to “break the chain of the fuckups of the fathers”. This feminist hymn particularly inspired Tobias Gremmler, who orchestrated Björk as a hybrid creature, modelling her before our eyes into flowers and undulating mountains: “The visual transformation of Björk into faun-like flowers and mountainous landscapes embodies the utopian concept of a harmonious coexistence between nature and human based on empathy”, explains the video maker. This new incarnation of Björk continues the metaphor of wildlife, already started with her first music video The Gate, which accompanies the many flutes and bird song heard on the album. On until June 1st, the Cornucopia performance can be seen at the Shed before it sets off on an international tour.
