Magaio Voicescapes: Terceiro Ciclo de Residências Artísticas
Civil Parishes of Candal and Manhouce (municipality of São Pedro do Sul)
12 September – 30 September 2011
Public Presentations: 1 and 2 October 2011
Resident Artists:
Josef Sprinzak (Israel)
Carmina Escobar (Mexico)
Toine Horvers (The Netherlands) & Myriam van Imschoot (Belgium)
Patrícia Azevedo (Brazil) & Clare Charnley (UK)
Rogério Nuno Costa (Portugal)
The voice is the main instrument of human communication. The voice draws and transmits content, creates links between subjects and involves listening and participation. The voice (ours and others) takes us out, frees us from the unbearable weight of repetition, which otherwise we would be confined to. Voice is sound, is a symbol of interiority otherwise inexpressible. The voice prepares the sense of place where the word will be said.
The voice is an archetypal force, it is a primordial image endowed with a powerful creative dynamism. It is the “place” where the language articulates, that goes beyond the voice with all its existential force, materiality and meaning. “The voice is a question not yet organized, pure and free significant that pointing, waving and alluding without saying. The voice says itself in the moment it is said: it is pure demand. The inarticulate shout, the pure groan, the wordless vocalization, the cry of the war are explosions of the being that identifies itself with its own voice: the voice is the desire to say and to exist.” (Paul Zumthor)
In the rural region of the Portuguese mountain range of Gralheira (S. Pedro do Sul Municipality), inhabited by communities that had subsistence agriculture and herding as dominant activities, and in which electricity and, consequently, TV, arrived only about 30 years ago, all knowledge and communication had the human voice as their medium. This fact was enough to give a dense richness to the whole oral discourse… the idiosyncrasy, the puzzling, the subliminal, the accents… issues that increasingly are being more standardized.
The Magaio Voicescapes residency program proposes to create a dialogue between all forms of rural oral heritage and contemporary art forms (sound art, performance, vocal poetry) centered in the human voice and that work with issues as origin, meaning, the relationship with the sacred (reconnected to its meaning and ancestral symbolism of mystery and symbol), the voice as a pivotal element of rituals, customs and superstitions, able to enchant the listener and bring deep changes to the reality, in the communities and territory, the voice as the protagonist of memories, myths, archetypes, folk wisdom handed down through the centuries, or even the voice of everyday, tool for work and life.
Art Projects:
Josef Sprinzak (Israel)
Bedtime Stories & Lullabies
A series of intimate performances in homes of families in the villages of the Gralheira region in front of children and parents. As a sound and vocal artist performer, Josef Sprinzak will come to private sleeping places taking the role that combines between the musician-poet-storyteller and the “stranger” who performs vocal pieces and ritualistic actions that are based on foreign languages – mainly Hebrew, Gibberish and perhaps a bit of English. The bedtime performance is a format that explores the voice in a context lying between the functional and the artistic, the recognized and the estranged. The sessions will have an interactive nature that will exceed standard theatrical relations of performer/audience and become “events” in the sense of the visual performance art tradition. The bedtime events will be rendered through use of objects, portable sound sources, vocal acts and role switching between the participants and the performer.
Josef Sprinzak is a sound and performance artist living and working in Tel Aviv. His professional training includes computer science, visual theater and voice work. He is among the first text sound/sound poetry artists in Israel and his work consists of accurate scores of speech, recorded speech, vocalizations, body gestures, movements and spatial relations dealing with private and collective identity, relations between language and consciousness, history and memory.
http://www.myspace.com/josefsprinzak
Carmina Escobar (Mexico)
Carmina Escobar proposes the development and realization of a concert- performance in which she will look for the integration of diverse elements, sonic objects and experiences that the space proposes to her own aesthetic speech, coined mainly into the involvement of a personal narrative and corporal and sonorous language within the creation of a scenic space in which the ritual of performance itself is driven and linked by the voice in its naked form or electronically processed. The concert – performance will be developed as well as a sonic installation, which will have as a main task the tying of the community as an active part of the creative processes that would take place within this residency.
Carmina Escobar is a singer and multimedia artist from Mexico City that has collaborated in many dif ferent projects, which explore a diversity of sonorous languages such as medieval music, opera, contemporary music, folk music, electronic music and experimental trends involving interdisciplinary collaborations and multimedia. As a soloist she has performed concerts of contemporary repertoire for solo voice, the premieres of works by young composers and performances of her own compositions. She is beholder of a master degree in Voice Performance by the California Institute of the Arts, master focused on extended vocal techniques, improvisation and interdisciplinary and multimedia performance.
http://www.carminaescobar.com
Toine Horvers (The Netherlands) & Myriam Van Imschot (Belgium)
Walking, singing, talking the landscape
Both artists share an invested interest in language, sound and voice at the intersection point where people and places meet. For the Nodar Artist Residency program they would like to engage in an experimental mapping of the network of “Aldeias de Magaio”, focusing on the interconnectedness of the villages in the region and their surroundings. Rural villages are often thought of as being isolated, yet, they function in a complex web of movements, passages, traffic of desires and knowledge, involving both humans, animals, fauna and flora.
Toine and Myriam will experience the movement and connections of the roads and alternate smaller routes, embracing the accidental encounters on their way. This will lead to a sound-based and verbal work, which may involve drawing and sound recordings, dealing with the elasticity of distance and time, the alternation of arrivals, departures, transitions, destination and getting lost, etc. in a landscape in perpetual motion as we cross it.
Toine Horvers, a visual artist works with language and text, in both visual and audial/performative ways. He wants to give language a ritual form, to create a temporary sculpture out of language, a gesture in space and time. He presents the descriptions of his observations of situations and processes from the his surrounding world, in different media: performance (solo or group) handwritten books, sound installations or electronic text displays. The voice plays an essential role in his performances, solo it is the instrument that determinates his place in space. In more expanded projects and performances the voice is the medium by which people and places can be connected, sometimes in one space, sometimes over long distances.
http://www.toinehorvers.nl/
Myriam Van Imschoot (1969) started her performance and art practice with performance lectures. Originally a writer, she has been influenced by artists like Vito Acconci, who as a poet traded the page for other media. In that vein she looks for the slippery passages where she can slide into other fields of expression, often unknown to her. The artistic work that she developed over the past years in the series ‘Expanded Publications’ engages different media and their sensorial potential, such as video, performance and sound installation. Myriam Van Imschoot has been the artistic leader of Sarma (with Jeroen Peeters) since 2003. Amongst other things in 2010-2011 she is developing with vzw Constant internet software specific to publication of audio-documentation and sound poetry.
http://www.sarma.be/nieuw/critics/imschoot.htm
Patrícia Azevedo (Brazil) & Clare Charnley (UK)
Projecto Gestosinho
The artists’ proposal is to create interactions with people in the area of Manhouce, its social and geographical space, identity and memory, to achieve a sound poem, using red sound chips, such as those found in talking toys. Questioning the power of oral culture and that of the rural world that still maintains a special relationship with the landscape and its uses, the artists will weave a poetic fabric of overlapped material and immaterial realities. The recording process is to walk and to record in sound chips a series of sound figures found in landscapes and everyday life scenes, and then to invite people to listen to them and to create a free translation of sound to the voice, an onomatopoeia or figure of speech, using their own voice, to be recorded on another audio chip.
Clare Charnley (UK) and Patricia Azevedo (BR) work in partnership since 2007. They use different media – photography, audio, video, performances – to develop projects that equate observations on language, territory and power relations. They locate their own work not only on the artifacts | images they conceive but also on the established relationships between people and the communicative act itself. By working together they received awards from Visiting Arts and British Council and were finalists in the Northern Art Prize 2009. They were also, in 2010, commissioned to develop projects at Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; Besfast Exposed, Belfast; PSL Gallery, Leeds; Crunchtime, York. In addition, Patricia Azevedo is a professor of Visual Arts at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil and Clare Charnley is a Professor of Fine Arts from Leeds Metropolitan University.
Rogério Nuno Costa (Portugal)
Vou à tua Mesa
The project “Vou à tua Mesa” (“I’m going to your table”) comes in the context of the trilogy “Eu Vou a tua Casa” (“I’m going to your house”) (2003/2006), a theatrical performance that happened at the homes of viewers, in public spaces to the viewers choice and at the artist’s own home. During the third phase of the project “Eu Vou a tua Casa” (generally sub-titled “Side C”, 2006) the project “Vou à tua Mesa” began to take its first steps. The performance was the creation of a relational and conferencial context that happened at the table for a meal prepared by the artist, while host, speaker, chef, master of ceremonies and moderator of a fictionalized working meeting. The food is in this context not only a powerful metaphor denouncing the concepts of intimacy and closeness (dear to the entire trilogy), but also the pluperfect pretext for the realization of an idea of theatrical performance as a “meeting” using the specific element of food as a device for a sensitive/sensorial revelation and as macro-concept, at the same time performative, ritualistic, visual and relational.
Lives and works in Lisbon, as an artist, researcher and teacher. He graduated in Social Communication and attends the Master in Contemporary Culture and New Technologies. He worked with the Teatro Praga, Sónia Baptista, Lúcia Sigalho, Alain Béhar, Rosa Coutinho Cabral, Nelson Guerreiro, Teresa Prima, among others. Also collaborated with several companies and structures, such as: Alkantara, CCB, Centro em Movimento, Chão de Oliva, Sonda Festival, Quarta Parede, Transforma AC, APAP,[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column] [/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
http://www.rogerionunocosta.com