Nour Mobarak’s Dafne Phono is a sculptural ensemble dense with sound and language. The project is Mobarak’s reinterpretation of history’s first known opera, Dafne, presented in 1598 by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini. Dafne follows the Ovidian myth of Daphne, a nymph who was turned into a tree by her father, the river god Peneus, to resist the advances of the zealous, enamored Greek god Apollo. In Mobarak’s reworking of the opera, 15 sculptural components present as the dramatic cast. Rendered in earth tones, these forms comprise bulbous masses, columnal stalks, and a suspended tubular structure—most of which incorporate mycelium fungi. Mycelium’s natural process of growing through decomposition parallels Mobarak’s deconstruction of the historical opera and her subsequent rearticulation of its libretto in contemporary terms. Each of her “singing sculptures” embodies a distinct character in the opera and marks the sources of its associated sounds. One form portrays a cherub (Cupid); others represent the protagonists Daphne and Apollo. While none of Dafne Phono’s operatic sound is produced or performed live, the work’s concern with the capture and release of the voice unfolds in a distinctly performative vein.

In Ovid’s myth, Apollo eventually possessed Daphne by transmuting her from a tree into a laurel branch, which ultimately became the Greek symbol of victory. History retains its hold on Daphne in object form: her means of escape is turned into the symbolic garb of conquerors through metonymic force. Similarly, Dafne Phono contended with the tension between performative action—opera’s unique choral tendencies, sung as if spoken, plus vocalization at large—and the absorptive power of objects. In MoMA’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, the comparatively ordered, Apollonian regime of the visible vies with more unruly sonic regimes. In contrast to the defined geometric forms of the sculptures, Dafne Phono’s opera intentionally flirts with unintelligibility.

Using Rinuccini’s libretto from the original opera as her reference, Mobarak composed Dafne Phono’s score with rarely spoken and indigenous languages, including Abkhaz, Chatino, Silbo Gomero, !Xoon (Taa dialect), in addition to Latin, Italian, and English. In the course of successive translations that centered the percussive and rhythmic character of the singers’ articulation, the Ovidian libretto was subject to numerous transformations and deformations. With music sung in these multiple tongues, varied phonemes such as clicks and sibilances come to the fore. The result is a polyphonic choral composition, where sentences and words dissolve into a more abstract musical texture. A video displaying the English translation of Mobarak’s multi-lingual score suggests that syntax had been allowed to fold poetically onto itself: “already saw now? Felt you inside trap.”

Dafne Phono hinges on lost music, which Mobarak reconceived in relation to minor languages—rather than just the dominant speech of Western Europe. For the artist, the use of rare, phonetically unique and complex languages contests the forced transmission of hegemonic languages through colonialism. Her polyphonic reinterpretation of Dafne’s libretto is a performance about the life and death of performance; the persistence of the choral voice, the multitude against univocal, authoritative speech. Nevertheless, this sonic orchestration across each sculptural character was at times challenging to follow in MoMA’s gallery. The project seemed to ask for extra space to breathe, a way for its voices to occupy objects with a presence equal to that with which the objects themselves seemed to take center stage.

Yet this very challenge—the optical’s potential to overtake the auditory, especially in the space of the museum—lends the work its power. Because Dafne Phono is predicated partly on the foreignness and sonic complexity of its languages, missing (or misunderstanding) parts of the score are inherent to its project. The polyphony of the voice is the central player in Dafne Phono. Its song might at first seem submerged in the visible and fungal world of its sculptures. Yet when one relates to the work durationally, as a performance across both time and space, its chorus of disparate tongues rises to the surface.