Laylla AbuGharbieh

Following the release of her EP QNTM in 2024, Yoniro returns with a new and ambitious project, born from a year of reflection and introspection, which has led the artist to explore her Salento roots. From this cathartic immersion emerged “CANTICO”, a concept album that explores and fuses the tradition of the Taranta with electronic sound research. The result is a highly experimental work in which music and visual arts merge into a single multidisciplinary language.

At Semiofest 2024, held in Porto in May, I presented on the topic of the postpartum period. The theme for Semiofest 2024 was liminality, and I talked about the in-between-ness so many new parents feel after the arrival of a child. Childbirth is often depicted as a singular, transformational act. Parents — and in particular mothers — are supposed to birth a new version of themselves at the same moment they birth a child. But, for many, the reality is different.

The ‘Mamasphere’ — aka the Internet of All Things Mother — blinked into existence in the late ’90s. As dial up hummed to life, mothers connected across borders and in chat rooms for the first time. The first wave of mommy bloggers, most notably Dooce(Heather Armstrong), penned irreverent, unfiltered confessionals on the messy realities of motherhood, and countered the picture-perfect madonnas of traditional media.