Artistic Works

Cà

“Cá” is a video installation on two screens (Cá#1, Cá#2). This installation is part of “Locus in Quo”, a multidisciplinary project about the meaning of places conceived in 2009. “Cá” combines field recordings, “extended vocal techniques” focused on the relationship between voice, soundscape and acoustic properties of places, with performance and video art.

  • “Cá #1” shows a painful “mater” who, with a solemn step, walks slowly and silently through the streets of an abandoned village. Whenever she approaches a house, its walls cry water. Once inside a house, she finds the remains of an old sheaf of corn, presumably part of the village’s last harvest. Then she begins a mourning ritual. In the destructive fury of lamentation, Maria lives a symbolic death to give life to a new Maria, who has absorbed the knowledge of the village and goes far away to continue the tradition. Between paganism and Christianity, the video shows the image of Mary as a mourner suffering from the death of the village, a symbol of the ancient world, represented by the bundle of corn. The video is built around some “tableaux vivants”, static poses near the doors, windows and walls of empty houses that express, in a clear, simple and effective way, very complex contents. The objective is to show the present, to make it more “real”. The “tableaux vivants” alternate with images of the walls that mourn the passing of the woman; they are a different color from the rest of the video: it is a way of isolating these images, felt as “necessary” to emphasize the tragic sense of the story being told. Lamentation, the ritual of crying linked to the harvest, is a device to overcome the trauma of death, to give form to the pain and memories related to the disappearance; it is a fundamental step to find the strength to continue living. Therefore, the woman in the agony of pain is the bearer of life. As a witness, there are the palms of the hands, the color of copper, where grass still grows. Copper in alchemy is the symbol of life force and water, the water that still flows to the abandoned village three times a week to continue to irrigate its abandoned fields. The water that falls from the walls therefore has two meanings: suffering and death, but also strength and rebirth.
  • “Cá #2” is a video projected on a wall composed of images that capture the reality of the villages, their desolation and abandonment. The approach is analytical and detailed. The video describes what the eye sees, the surface elements… the skin of the place. A disquieting and unpredictable dimension manifests itself in the landscape in which listening, stillness and calm predominate, in which ambient sounds and the voice intensify and amplify this characteristic. The sound composition consists of sounds of the performer’s voice recorded in the field and captured with binaural microphones in abandoned villages, by sounds from abandoned villages and by music played by the Philharmonic Society of Santa Cruz de Alvarenga (Arouca) captured at a party in the village of Parada de Ester (Castro Daire).

“Birdsoundcage” is a cage for birds recreated through the medium of sound in an empty and sterile room. Inside it, there is a body flopped to the ground, completely bandaged, that in order to survive decides to make a custom- made cage made by prostheses. The prosthesis are obtained by setting with a white patch twigs of wood on the lower and upper limbs of the body. The organic matter with whom the prostheses are made, is the rest of a nest, a place of the past that no longer exists. “Birdsoundcage” is a symbolic place to which we’re invited to give some meaning.

Excerpt of “Birdsoundcage” by Manuela Barile, 2009

The cage is an imaginary place built around a body, which evokes a place within the body to a state of being. The cage could be many things, many unpleasant situations that we are inevitably forced to live, that aren’t imposed by others, but that nonetheless we tend to gather. Therefore, the cage can have a double significance. The cage is the prison or the nest, depending on our approach to life and the meaning we give to things. In a situation of discomfort, sadness and despair, the cage can become into something positive when pain place us in a situation of confrontation, when pain becomes sharing and act upon our will. Closure can then become openness. The loss of liberty, due to the existence of a restriction, an impediment, an obstruction is a resolvable condition. Building a cage with the remains of the nest, to Manuela Barile, means accepting the pain, let it flow. It also means to connect to the past, to what we were, to our own experiences, from which we can always gain new knowledge.

“Birdsoundcage” is a symbolic place of which we are invited to make sense.
“Birdsoundcage” is part of Locus in quo, a multidisciplinary project produced by Binaural/Nodar and funded by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture.

Biography:

Manuela Barile (b. Bari, Itália 1978) is a vocal and an interdisciplinary researcher and performer that lives in S. Pedro do Sul county. Her artistic research is based on a projectual work that combines voice sounds with different mediums (“field recordings”, video, photography, installations, performance, concert-performance, drawings, written work). As a vocal performer Manuela Barile has worked and collaborated with numerous artists of the northern-american experimental movement. In June of 2006, along with Pino Pipoli, Barile participated in the contemporary art event “Fresco Bosco”, of which Achille Bonito Oliva was the curator. In 2007, she initiated a collaboration with the portuguese sound artist, Rui Costa, towards the development of the big scale project called “La Scatola”, which was conceived as a series of installation and/or performances. In 2009, Manuela contrived a sequence of sound and video installations presented in several museum galleries and european/north-american video festivals, about the meaning of places, entitled “Locus in Quo”.