Author: Rui Costa
Catalog Number: Nodar Editions, nodar.028
“Once, I was 16. At that age I still looked like a child. It was on the way back from Saigon, after the Chinese lover, on a night train, the Bordeaux train, around 1930.
(…)
Around the train, at night. The silence of the corridors amid the noise of the train. The stops that woke you up. He went down into the night. In Paris when I opened my eyes, his place was empty”.
In “The Train from Bordeaux” by Marguerite Duras.
A sound piece based on Marguerite Duras’ short text “Le Train de Bordeaux”. The work is a reflection on the resonance of spoken language prior to the production of meaning. The short story was interpreted in its dynamics and musicality and, based on it, a score was produced to conduct the development of the piece over time. Then the text was given to several people of different languages who read it aloud and recorded the readings into sound. By this, a single text was translated into sound (verbal and non-verbal) using a multi-layered approach where text, voice, idiom, body, subjectivity, linguistics all intermingled within the piece.
This work premiered at Centro Em Movimento, Lisbon (Portugal) on June 10th, 2004.
Credits:
Composition: Rui Costa
Voice: Begoña Ríos, Marc Behrens, Rui Costa
Rui Costa is a sound artist and arts programmer from Lisbon, Portugal. He is a founding member of Binaural Nodar, an arts organization created in 2004 and dedicated to the promotion of context-specific and participatory art projects in rural communities of Viseu, Portugal. Rui Costa has been performing and exhibiting his art work since 1998 and collaborating regularly with the American intermedia artist Maile Colbert. He co-edited the book “Three Years in Nodar: Context-Specific Art Practices in Rural Portugal”, published by Edições Nodar in 2011 and created many sound works presented and/or edited in multiple Portuguese and international contexts.