Ignacio Martínez e Marta Bernardes

Fauna Fonética – Voz Animal

“A voice and a violin in search for each other, intheir possible encounter they look for the echoes of their immanent animality”

Beasts, wolves, birds, insects… since times immemorial men have observed animals, envied their powers, feared their attacks, imitated their privileges with the most ingenious means, as cribed to the gods their noble qualities, carved a mulets and magical objects with their forms, weaved histories and legends about their mysteries and dangers, kept their homes safe with their courage, decorated their banners and their cities with their forms. Some were tamed and became friends. Others were eliminated. Many others were domesticated to survive.

The popular universe, as well as that of modern or contemporary literature and cinema (Kafka is an example), is crowded with wonderful stories of metamorphoses and of “becoming-animal” and we can hear this primitive voice in all human societies. Some how, the human being is this sort of constant negotiation with the brutality of his/her animal condition, a fight which seems to never end and to which all tools and technologies are used: ideas, we apons, words, seeds, contraptions, lies, songs, and politics.

Today, even in the most so phisticated cities, where nature seems totally tamed and contained in geometric designs, pigeons, rats, mosquitoes and ants invade us and dogs, cats and centipedes inhabit them. (In the street kids how l like wolves, men get angry as beasts, beating each other and getting mad like raging bulls).

On this presence of the animal voice in men, we established our project in the following aspects: collecting testimonies of the population of Nodar about its fauna, its animals, legends, stories, songs, rhymes in which an animal acts as the main character or as a metaphor; sound and visual manipulation and reconstruction of the collected data,to build a performative multimedia presentation with a strong visual appeal, which although not strictly an thropological, had the aim to give back to the community its investment and its energy.

The human voice and the animals voice, their possible meeting or maladjustment, the particularities of their coexistence amongst the people of Nodar, were the main axis of the project, either as guidelines for the treatment of the audio-visual-performative material or for the treatment of the sculptural-sonic devices inspired on the local environment: their anatomy and their shapes. There was room left for improvisation, to experience and feel the space and the instant. Bearing in mind that we were working with voices, the long heritage of experimental poetry, sound/phoneticor visual, was of the utmost importance as it’s difficult to forget the long-standing links between the human voice and writing; the connection between the animal voice and the body and its secret mortal evidence of vitality, that is, of perenniality.

“Fauna fonética-Voz animal” is a multidisciplinary project.The issue of multidisciplinarity has as much to dow it hour life courses and their coming together, as with the idea of going to a place to create an arrative that is difficult to express and, therefore, the more elements we have to express it, the more solid it will be. We don’t relate with one particular artistic field but rather with the connection between different fields and their different codes. In this project, it’s quite clear that we look for something beyond language. What escapes language and is in between languages; by putting them together we cannot ice the gaps between them, which renders them clearer and, therefore, communicable.

In that level, we operate more in extension than in depth, as a constellation or a map and notas an archaeological excavation.

We came to the conclusion that the biggest difficulty of our work would be to create an object. We made the video to create the temporality, we made objects to create a sound base, to allow the performance to be left to improvisation and to the ideas that were falling on us and that were much more interesting as a performative act. An example of this was the video we had made with the balloons, which we after wards chose be part of the performative act.

To understand how the animality is representedin different idioms,the pure and simple animality of a body facing another, full of adrenaline, which as much as it tries to build a discourse will always face something stronger than any convention. We also wanted to touch the mythological and ancestral side that this environment evokes, as well as the childishness of the onomatopoeic sounds, of the animal, the blackbird eating an ant.

Animality as an opening. The performative space as a place open to improvisation is the reflection of that immanent condition of the animal opened to the circumstances.

Marta Bernardes is a Portuguese artist based in Spain who works in the areas of performance and audiovisual arts. She holds a Master Degree in Psychoanalys is and Philosophy of Culture by the Philosophy Faculty of Madrid. She has been attending workshops in Spain, Portugal, Netherlands and Belgium and has presented performances in several Portuguese venues.

Ignacio Martinez is a Spanish musician and sculptor. He holds a degree in Fine Arts by the Complutense University of Madrid and has been presenting several musical and theatrical projects throughout Spain.