DONNIMAAR
(DOMA)
info
Daughter Donnimaar
dances with the Knight of the Rose Garden in the song Æ Fåwanleng ('The Transformation'), which Johanne Tygesdatter sang to the Danish folklore
collector Evald Tang Kristensen in 1873,
when during his fieldwork he visited her in Sammelsted
By on Ørre Heath in Western Jutland. Donnimaar is a music and visual arts project by Marie Kølbæk
Iversen. The title of her first album, Donnimaar. Vredens Børn, combines the main character Daughter Donnimaar
from Æ Fåwanleng with the title
of the novel Vredens Børn ('Children
of Wrath') written in 1904 by Jutlandic writer
Jeppe Aakjær. The project is anchored in the
ethnographic material that Tang Kristensen collected on the West Jutlandic heathlands—among others from Tygesdatter, who was Marie Kølbæk
Iversen's great-great-great-great-grandmother. Donnimaar is a shapeshiftress, and Kølbæk
Iversen's project consists of both live and recorded elements, which are
produced and unfolded through a network of collaborations. Marie Kølbæk
Iversen’s second album, Donnimaar. O TILLI was published on January 24, 2025, on the occasion of Kølbæk Iversen’s solo exhibition “New Atlantics” at Kunsthal Aarhus. The show approximates
the point of view of the sea when observing human life and culture in a
deep-time perspective. The album is produced in close collaboration with
Katinka Fogh Vindelev, Torleik
Mortensen, Andreas Tykjær Restorff,
Michael Ejstrup and Laurent Schmid, and it is issued
as a vinyl LP by Speckled Toshe. “O tilli”
means “on the floor” and the title quotes one of the album’s four songs
that tells of a mermaid who has been abducted by the Danish queen to tell
the queen’s fortune. Negotiating the terms of their exchange, the mermaid
finds herself “dancing on the floor,” that is: Flapping and flailing on the
floor like a fish. Donnimaar traces deep family ties, and Marie Kølbæk
Iversen would like to thank her parents, siblings and extended
family—aunts, uncles, and cousins—for making music and history a living
part of our life together.
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The album's five songs relate to a different cultural tradition than the
Protestant Christian and national romantic context of their collection:
They are largely (and in places explicitly) proto-feminist, apocalyptic,
anti-Christian, anti-materialist, and anti-Danish.
Donnimaar stands on your shoulders.