Binaural Nodar, in partnership with the Municipality Oliveira de Frades, announces that it started on July 8th and will continue until July 20th the artist residence “Homo et Bestia” dedicated to contemporary artistic reflections on the relationship between humanity and animality in a rural context.
The residency takes place in São João da Serra (Parish of São João da Serra, Municipality of Oliveira de Frades), is coordinated by Manuela Barile and includes three women artists from Brazil, Germany and Portugal:
Judith Sönnicken (Germany) and Diana Policarpo (Portugal)
Judith Sönnicken and Diana Policarpo will develop a collaborative sound work with the objective of punctuating processes and actors involved in the sound geography of the São João da Serra area. Based on sound research that includes recordings of the artists’ interaction with human and non-human inhabitants, they will create scores and notations that will document and generate their involvement in local activity. These scores will not only become the project archive, but will also serve as the basis for their final live presentation. The archive to be created will give visibility and audibility to social and geographical transitions within the ecosystem, from oral traditions of the past to sound carpets composed today.
Judith Sönnicken is a German artist who works on what she calls “dimensional athletics, plasticity of memory and primal immersion.” What constitutes corporeality and how does it communicate with the environment? In her site-specifc work “Immersive 4D matrices” Sönnicken placed visitors within the mental architecture of geographic locations. Her work “Magic Capes” are textile empowerment circles, surrounding “selves”, making the interface between the old cosmological symbolism and contemporary materials. In her last piece, “Google Gardening” she used Virtual Reality to invade privatized environments in Silicon Valley. In 2017, she co-founded Befriending Hyperobjects, a performative interaction with hyperobjects in the digital and analog space.
Diana Policarpo is a visual artist and Portuguese composer who lives and works between London (United Kingdom) and Lisbon (PT). She graduated from Goldsmiths College with a master’s degree in Fine Arts in 2013 and her work investigates power relations, popular culture and gender politics, juxtaposing the rhythmic structuring of sound as a tactile material within the social construction of esoteric ideology. In addition to working on solo projects, she often collaborates with Scratch Orchestra, Hákarl, Áine O’Dwyer, AAS, Cabiria, Erinyes and The Orchestra of Futuristic Noise Intoners. Diana Policarpo was recently announced as the winner of the EDP New Artists Award 2019.
Bella (Brazil)
The dimension of the myth was always been present in Bella’s sound work, either directly or indirectly. In 2015, the artist was inspired by the myth of Woman-Wolf to compose “Singing to the bones”, a work in which she would stack dozens of songs by composed by women on a magnetic tape recording, to the limit of saturation; and then the same tape was fired with a corner overlaid on it. For the artist residency, her objective is to investigate the rural myths of São João da Serra associated with animals and build a sound art composition from them.
Bella was born in Rio de Janeiro (Brasil); she lives and works in São Paulo. Her work proposes to erase the boundaries between sound and space, based on a performance focused on the imperceptible movements of reality. She has been developing performances, installations and sound walks, which explore the relationship between physical and conceptual aspects of sound matter. She often works with collaborations, relating sound to dance, visual arts and multimedia. She has participated in festivals, exhibitions and artist residencies in Brazil and abroad such as in New York, Berlin, Chile, Switzerland and Copenhagen, in addition to having her sound productions broadcast on radio stations such as Resonance FM, BBC, Radio Tsonami, Documenta 14 and WFMU.