About „Gebrochene Zeit“ [„Broken time“]

My home town St. Petersburg is famous for its back yards. We call them „water well-yards“. I close my eyes and imagine myself being in the centre of St. Petersburg. Here in one of the houses I see an archway. I go through it into the yard. I find myself in a different space. For me, in some way, time ends here. I call it „broken time“ and imagine it like so:

There flows a river of time, say from right to left – from right into the future, from left into the past. Here I take my imaginary scissors and cut the river in two. The left side keeps on flowing into the past. But the right side, having lost contact to the left, starts flowing in circles. In my piece I tried to observe where the past flows to, how the present is encircled and what void is forming under my imaginary cut into the flow of time.

Dariya Maminova

Dariya Maminova (*1988) is a composer, pianist and singer. She works in the fields of contemporary music theatre, instrumental and electronic composition as well as improvisation. Her works strive to synthesize experimental and popular genres from many different musical cultures. Together with artists from Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South-Africa and Namibia, Dariya has been part of the interdisciplinary project Framewalk by Kabawil in Dusseldorf since 2013. Other forms of musical contact she realizes in her solo project Dariya’s Songs or with the duo MAMI NOVA, that she founded together with her sister, the percussionist Malika Maminova. Dariya Maminova studied piano and composition at the state conservatory in her home town St. Petersburg, as well as composition at the conservatories in Detmold (Prof. Fabien Lévy) and Cologne (Johannes Schöllhorn, Brigitta Muntendorf). http://www.dariya-maminova.com/