A glimpse of I am Maria! Voices of those who came before, echoes of mothers, grandmothers, and the unseen women who live within our songs. Read my reflections on this piece in the blog: We Are Story Carriers

I am Maria! is an immersive, evolving performance that reclaims women’s voices in classical music through sound, image, and story. Drawing from art song, opera, and lived experience, the work invites audiences into a shared act of remembering and a return from silence to sound, from contained to full expression.

This practice-based research listens for what lies beneath classical training, the cultural, the intergenerational, the silenced. Using performative autoethnography, Marina examines how a classically trained singer transforms from interpreter to creative artist.

At the core of I am Maria! lies a process of artistic deconstruction. Through this work, Marina Poša examines how a classically trained singer can dismantle and reimagine the very frameworks that have shaped her voice. Immersing herself in performance-based inquiry, she explores how embodied experience, memory, and identity intersect with the inherited discipline of classical vocal practice.

This exploration challenges traditional notions of mastery and control replacing them with presence, vulnerability, and experimentation. The research draws upon autoethnography as both method and material, positioning the voice as a living archive through which personal and cultural histories are sounded, questioned, and transformed.

In this unfolding process, Marina’s classical training is not abandoned but repurposed a structure to be unmade and remade in dialogue with her evolving artistic identity. I am Maria! becomes both site and method: a performative act of inquiry that blurs the boundaries between singing, writing, and becoming.