Jorge daCruz- North variations-the twelve- for Fedderico Albanese soundtrack - Charcoal on paper | 120x278cm l © k37 studio, bethanienArtCenter Berlin Apri 2019
North Variations – The Twelve, 2019
For Federico Albanese’s soundtrack
Charcoal on paper, 120 × 278 cm
Triptych
© K37 Studio, Bethanien Art Center, Berlin
Text by noT
North Variations – The Twelve is a charcoal triptych created as a visual response to Federico Albanese’s soundtrack The Twelve.
The music is shaped around memory, movement, resilience, and ancestral knowledge. Rather than illustrating it directly, the drawing follows its emotional structure: a movement between landscape, displacement, human presence, and something older than language.
The triptych unfolds across three panels. Each section carries its own atmosphere, but the work is held together by rhythm, distance, and a quiet sense of passage.
On the left, a Nordic landscape appears open and still. It suggests balance, silence, and a fragile harmony between human presence and the land. The space feels wide, but not empty. It carries the calm of a place that has learned to endure.
On the right, the landscape begins to fragment. Houses seem to float. Figures drift. The ground feels less stable. This is not chaos, but movement: a space shaped by migration, adaptation, survival, and the search for a place to stand.
At the center, two figures face upward with raised arms. The gesture is difficult to define. It is not exactly prayer, not exactly dialogue, not exactly surrender. It sits somewhere between asking and reaching. This moment becomes the emotional core of the drawing: quiet, suspended, and full of longing.
Behind them, a large vertical form rises. It feels part monument, part spirit, part witness. It holds the composition together, standing between the calm of the left panel and the unstable terrain on the right. It becomes a keeper of memory, a presence that does not speak but remains.
The drawing reflects what is present in Albanese’s music: stories carried through places, bodies, gestures, and voices. Each track in The Twelve is connected to a person, an experience, or a cultural memory. The music becomes a moving portrait, intimate and vast at the same time.
North Variations was directly inspired by Lyudmila Khomovna of the Uilta people in Siberia. Her presence, as described by Albanese, carries warmth within harshness — a softness that survives in difficult conditions. Another track, The Stars We Follow, follows the movements of Aoki Hiroyuki in Japan, where a martial-arts-based practice becomes a meditation on direction and pursuit.
Charcoal felt necessary for this world. Its density, softness, and instability allow the image to move between matter and atmosphere. It can create distance, but also intimacy. It can build a figure, then let it disappear into shadow.
In this triptych, charcoal becomes a way to hold memory without fixing it completely. The drawing does not explain the music. It listens to it.
North Variations – The Twelve is a work about distance, endurance, and the quiet force of inherited stories. A landscape, a migration, a gesture, and a monument held together by sound.nOT
Federico Albanese — North Variation Official Music Video
Artwork for The Twelve Official Soundtrack, 2019
Drawing by Jorge da Cruz
Animation by Maria Lanowski
Text by Jorge da Cruz
North Variation is part of The Twelve, a soundtrack by Federico Albanese built around memory, resilience, movement, and personal histories.
When Federico invited me to collaborate on the visuals for this piece, I was drawn not only to the music, but to the stories behind it. Each track in The Twelve is connected to a real person: someone whose life, gestures, knowledge, or presence shaped the sound. The image had to respond to that emotional material without illustrating it too directly.
The official video brings together my charcoal drawings with animation by Maria Lanowski. It unfolds slowly, almost meditatively, following the rhythm of the music rather than forcing a narrative onto it. The drawings came from the same visual world as the triptych North Variations – The Twelve, created around the same period.
For North Variation, one of the strongest references was Lyudmila Khomovna of the Uilta community in Siberia. Federico described her presence as a form of warmth inside harsh conditions — a softness that survives in the middle of coldness. That image stayed with me and guided the atmosphere of the work.
The album carries many of these quiet intensities. Another piece, The Stars We Follow, was inspired by Aoki Hiroyuki in Japan, whose movement practice exists somewhere between martial art, dance, and meditation. Federico described it as “chasing the stars,” a phrase that holds both direction and longing.
Charcoal made sense for this world. It can be dense or almost weightless. It can create figures, landscapes, shadows, and spaces that remain partly undefined. It allows an image to breathe without becoming too fixed.
In North Variation, I was not trying to explain the music. I wanted to create a visual space that could stay close to it: slow, open, fragile, and atmospheric.
This collaboration was not about matching image to sound. It was about listening through drawing — allowing memory, movement, and silence to take form.
It remains one of the most intuitive and meaningful collaborations I have been part of.