Dit

Eipo woman
14 x 11 inches, various materials on paper, 2020

The Eipo are a people speaking the Mek (Eipo-mek) language along the valleys of the Eipo River in Western Papua which is the part of Papua that belongs to Indonesia. The other half of this giant island is the autonomous country Papua New Guinea. As I have been doing for a while I have written down the COVID-19 numbers applying to country of origin of the music at the particular moment of me finishing the drawing at the bottom. The large number of infected and dead people in Indonesia are not very representative of the situation in West Papua, so I included also the numbers for Papua New Guinea (only two known cases a few days ago.) The track from the Eipo people in the Top 100 is again from this majestic compilation Voices of the World: An Anthology of Vocal Expression. [Le Chant du Monde, 1996] The track is named Dit, individual singing and refers to style of song that is teasing, often sexual in content.