Špela Setničar
Špela Setničar (born 1996) is a Slovenian poet, scriptwriter, radio host, and performer, working as a self-employed cultural worker across literature, film, radio, and contemporary performance. She is currently completing parallel MA degrees in Comparative Literature and Screenwriting. Her poetry has been published in numerous Slovenian literary journals and anthologies; it was translated to Serbian and Croatian in literary magazine Fantom Slobode and anthology Rukopisi 47.
In 2024, Setničar published her poetry debut Everything I Need to Tell You, a collection that explores the embodied, sensory experience of girlhood and womanhood through an intimate engagement with death. The book traces a developmental arc from early childhood encounters with the death of domestic animals, through adolescence marked by symbolic deaths connected to formative and often fatal love, to the mid- and late twenties, where both the lyrical subject and the author confront a life-threatening illness - cancer. The poems move between tenderness and severity, naïveté and erotic humour, gradually articulating a struggle with mortality and the question of how writing can preserve what is otherwise transient.
The collection was met with strong critical reception and was recently nominated for Best Literary Debut at the Slovenian Book Fair. Critics have emphasised Setničar’s precise, imagistic language and her ability to articulate vulnerability without sentimentality, transforming personal experience into a shared emotional and physical space.
An important part of Setničar’s artistic practice is performance, where poetry extends beyond the page into sound and improvisation. Her live work combines interpretative speech with improvised music, treating the voice as both a semantic and sonic material. In collaboration with guitarist and instrumentalist Luka Flegar, she explores intuitive approaches to connecting sound and language, emotion and rhythm. The piece presented here is a recording of a musical improvisation and live reading which, through the gradual layering of effects and guitar melodies, transforms into an autonomous sound work.
In this current project – titled Motherwort, Setničar focuses on the sonic and narrative articulation of her maternal family lineage. Through spoken word, she constructs a matrilineal narrative that reflects on memory, inheritance, care, and the transmission of female experience across generations. The project will be further developed through video and visual elements, merging spoken text and sound into a cohesive interdisciplinary performance.
A central thematic axis of the work is maternal care understood as a desire for endless, intimate closeness that binds mother and child. This question resonates with the writings of numerous feminist authors who have addressed one of the fundamental dilemmas of female subjectivity: whether to have children or not. In the poetry of the sound recording, Setničar exposes this intimate inquiry by asking whether parenthood is ultimately a form of egoism -whether it means possessing a bird- or whether it is more ethical to merely observe it, preserving one’s own freedom (slightly referring to the poem: I am the queen of birds). These reflections are woven into the sonic texture of the piece, where voice, sound, and silence open a space for ambiguity rather than resolution.
