When I started my Master of Philosophy I set out to understand why it was that my voice felt like it no longer fit inside the world I had trained so hard to belong to. I am Maria! began as a necessity, to continue, to reinvent. I knew that the voice I had spent a lifetime perfecting was holding stories which were sleeping within me.

Stories of my mother.
Of Croatian words that felt like home.
Stories of grief, of memory of being a woman inside a system that rewards beautiful obedience and staying within the boundaries.

When research became part of my journey it revealed over time the stories within lodged in my voice and body. Between diary, ritual practice, natural voice and conversation with the past, a new Maria started to emerge.

I began to ask:

What happens if I stop trying to sing with my opera voice? What is my sound then? Is it meaningful? Is it ugly? Is it good enough?

I stopped trying and started exploring and playing, with a sound which I had forgotten but it contained remnants of my mother’s voice, my grandmother’s voice. It was an archive of culture and musical fragments.

What happens if the voice is allowed to carry memory?

What happens if a classically trained singer stops interpreting and starts authoring?

In all of these quesitons I am Maria! lives.

I am Maria! is:

Song that falls apart into speech,
Speech that dissolves into breath,
Croatian words returning to tell forbidden stories,
Electronic sounds sitting beside classical resonance,
Poetry, projections, looping voice, silence. . .

It is not spectacle or entertainment.

It is a space the audience walks into, and recognises something of themselves, a space where reflections of self bounce around the walls to enter the heart.

Certain images keep returning inside the work, like old friends:

The two Marias facing each other
The moth that becomes a phoenix
The sea that both separates and connects
The black ribbon carried through generations
My mother’s voice, always there, even when she is not. . .

These are not symbols I chose.
They are symbols that arrived, perhaps there all along.

Then somewhere along the way I realised:

This is not about leaving classical singing behind.
It is about allowing everything I have lived, learned, inherited, and felt to exist inside the sound.

I am Maria! is the place where the singer becomes a whole artist.

Where age is not decline, but depth.
Where memory is not nostalgia, but material.
Where voice is not decoration, but story.

If you explore this site you’ll find fragments of this world:
Experiments in sound, blog reflections, research thinking, poems, performances.

They all belong to the same unfolding question:

How can the voice become a home for identity, memory, and creative freedom?

This is I am Maria!

And it is still evolving. . .