The Silence of Overcrowded Spaces

Short Essay

The pandemic has been reshaping the experience of life from offline to online. The project Espaciaro in Bolivia shown at the In/Out Festival attempts to rethink this by exploring new listening narratives, while questioning the ubiquity of social media platforms.

We are located at 4000 meters above sea level, in the Bolivian Andes. In the highlands, the scarce vegetation and the silent animals that inhabit it leave space to the wind as the only interpreter. Silence is cultivated in the heights. These traits penetrate the linguistic identity of the Aymara (indigenous people living in the Andean plateau), making them silent beings. Speech is a moment of solemnity, an action that bursts into the sound environment. Music is highly ritualistic and connects with the needs of the agricultural calendar that governs their way of life.

By contrast, in the city, the sound is chaotic and ubiquitous; the street vendors, the excessive use of horns, the social demonstrations (who even use dynamite) in the central streets. A sound magma difficult to penetrate, which narrates the accelerated dynamics of urban life. The lockdown marks a return to silence. The resonance and sound of the streets is transferred to private space and is overcrowding homes. This unprecedented moment created a social trauma caused by militarized streets and rigid quarantines. Yet, it also caused an introspective moment for reflection.

Culture Moved Online

The vulnerability of the body in physical space has overpopulated corporate platforms disguised as social networks. The pandemic in Bolivia coincides with an unconstitutional government that ordered the closure of the Ministry of Culture. As museums and independent cultural initiatives remained closed for months, their only alternative was to transfer their contents to these platforms, without developing a critical position. This weakens the possibility of generating other environments outside the business of social networks.

In this context, the «[e.]spaciario» platform offers a journey to explore immersive and expanded listening narratives. The most critical example happened in school education. The government, without offering a specialized platform, ordered the continuation of classes to WhatsApp, which led to the closure of the academic year. [e.] approaches this national conflict from the rural territory. Claudia Copa, a Uru-Chipayan teacher, creates a sound piece in her native language alongside a photographic archive based on mobile photos and screenshots, that reveals the complex relationship between rurality and access to technology.

Semantic Games

Listeners are invited to surf outside the conventional routes and propos content focused on problems relating to their realities during the confinement. Feminist composer Adriana Aramayo, for example, narrates her semantic game of sound and emotion within the national sociopolitical context. The piece reproduces reflections on the conflicts generated in our society, through a body catharsis and the omnipresence of control and abuse of the State and mass-media.

[e.] commissioned eight media essays that question this new paradigm from the perspective of Bolivian creators who work with sound as their main material, addressing the fragility of social structures, the control of the body, and the tension between physical territories and virtual space.

Is the objective of the cultural producers to get more likes or to rethink the habits and platforms of cultural consumption in the new glocal scenario? Are social networks the repositories for hosting and preserving cultural content? The culture of silence is valuable when it is a conscious practice and not a corporate censorship.

Artist Statement

The pandemic forces our bodies and territories to experience themselves from the virtual point of view, whenever possible interacting on the physical plane. A new doctrine of control of the body is deployed, which forces us to social distance and paradoxically gives us overcrowding in the private sphere. It pushes us into virtual life out of fear of material death. These tensions between materiality and virtuality have been radically established worldwide.

Project curated and technically developed between Guely Morató Loredo and Víctor Mazón Gardoqui.

The Norient Special «Promise of Catharsis» is based on performances at the South American «In/Out Festival» that took place online between September 2 and 6 in 2020. It is funded by Pro Helvetia South America.

Biography

Sonandes is a platform for research and experimentation. It works from collective creative practices. The creators come from different specialties of art and other sciences. Generating multidisciplinary groups enhances the discourse as its participants share and socialize knowledge. This collective methodology is applied to its sound art biennial, to its residency program, laboratories, training processes and publications. It is a body of research and exchange that forges works and pieces developed in specific ways. Through [e.] platform we can understand and meet a group of young Bolivian creators who promote their own aesthetics and methodology. Follow them on their Website.

Published on March 11, 2021

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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Ensamble Tropi – «MODULAR» (photo: In/Out Festival).

The Promise of Freedom

Short Essay

by Guilherme Werneck

In audiovisual art, images tend to distract or enhance the supposed meaning of music. The performance Modular by the Argentinian Ensamble Tropi at In/Out Festival creates a productive dialogue between enhanced dichotomies produced by the COVID-19 pandemic: The open space of nature and the confinement of private places.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak hit South American countries in March 2020, people had to seek refuge in their homes. For most of us, living in big cities, this meant staying indoors, being dependent on screens, and, the worst part of it, apart from nature. Modular, a collection of audiovisual online performances conceived by Ensamble Tropi, starts from confinement but has a clear mission to direct our imagination and our sensibility towards outdoor spaces.

The Argentinian chamber music group recorded in isolation six pieces by young composers from different parts of the country, and the music was then accompanied by visuals captured and edited by Ramiro Iturrioz. Most dominant is the Patagonian scenery. Iturrioz, who lives in South Argentina, went out with a camera to record images around the rivers Negro, Limay, and Neuquén, and natural elements such as water, wind, soil, snow, and fire played a leading role in conducting the imagination through a music that otherwise could be perceived as quite claustrophobic. Since the works were composed in isolation, this contrast added a new layer of meaning.

Between Tonality and Noise

A piece like «Rumores Dosmesticos» by Manuel Esteban Tamar, took inspiration from everyday sounds heard in his house during the quarantine. The squeaks of a rusty door or the movement of a curtain that sounds like bamboo chimes in the wind explore the contrast between tonal music and noise. By adding the visuals, mainly poetic shoots of a river, the music is taken to another place. In «Elogio de las Sombras II» by Matias Ocarez, the composer deals with fragmentation of space and time, and the close-ups of plants and soil, almost in a psychedelic fashion, highlight the impermanent aspect of the sounds.

Even when the images are more in tune with the composition, they are still contrasting it. This is the case of «Nana Sin Tiempo» by Luz Pérez, a dark lullaby illustrated by flocks of snow at night, an image as bittersweet as the composition, and of «Habitaciones» by Horace Bravo, that evokes four rooms and its ghostly memories, accompanied by old family photos, and still life-like takes.

An Escape From the Dark Reality

The use of visuals to make strange music more palatable is a resource used throughout the second half of the 20^th century. It’s easier to get abstraction in a painting, but not in music. One exception is film: If the music is played in a context and is running in the background, it’s easier for an uninitiated audience to endure it. That’s the case of classic sci-fi and horror movies, like Vertigo or Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock.

But this is not the case in these pieces. The visual layer is not a distraction but a dialogue. By focusing on nature, the works offer a new perspective to the pandemic experience. The outdoor scenes refer to what we miss the most, and these pieces could be read as a promise of freedom in the days to come, as a relief for our current mental state and an escape from the dark reality of illness and death. In this sense, Modular works as a potent metaphor for our own human condition that is now subdued by nature’s designs.

The Norient Special «Promise of Catharsis» is based on performances at the South American «In/Out Festival» that took place online between September 2 and 6 in 2020. It is funded by Pro Helvetia South America.