Assonances, Resonances, Dissonances and Stridencies is the second creation exhibition [of 2011] to be scheduled at the Sala d’Art Jove. It consists of pieces by Laia Estruch, Cristina Hidalgo, Nicolás Rojas Hayes and Carlos Valverde in which sound and listening, whether in terms of language, storytelling, cacophony or noise, play a significant role.
It is this element of sound in its broadest sense which is the unifying force for all the individual projects. It is not the main topic in any of them, yet it is present in all of them in different ways: the voices of people in the cities where they live, the sound of cassette tapes, a story passed on orally and the search for a mythical ultrasound are just some of the ideas through which the artists explore topics such as memory, experience, nostalgia and the limits of perception.
In his project Nicolás Rojas Hayes focuses on making new objects which function as relational devices capable of generating situations for the visitor through their involvement, while he also works with existing appliances to give them new uses. In his projects the artistic device becomes an excuse, the situation becomes the ultimate goal and the visitor goes from being a mere spectator to become an active component through their intervention.
Out of this comes Ruido y nostalgia, a multiple cassette player that supports six cassette players at once. Each player is connected to a pair of separate speakers. When the appliance is switched on they all play at the same time and at the same volume. One of them is connected to a device that digitizes the tape inside it, so that anyone who wants to can use it to digitize their own tapes. The nature of the medium means that the tape has to be played in its entirety in order to be recorded.
Cristina Hidalgo’s work revolves around language as a positioning element for people’s discourse in their relationship with the place in which they live. It is an awareness exercise in which her interviewees, through repetition of their discourse, can identify (or not) with themselves. Talking about a place comes out of the artist’s common experiences and also from a desire to investigate, through the resonant melody of voices, the degree of standardization of the communities to which they belong. The second pillar of the project extends repetition in the opposite direction, with the subtraction of discourse but this time in written form, thus making the testimonies more textual and visible.
Laia Estruch’s Serendipity project is structured around the three performances (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3) the artist is to give in a facility next to the Sala d’Art Jove. In them she will tell her audience all the stories, random happenings and chance events that have accompanied the conception and development of her artistic idea.
It is thus a declarative meta-referential work which, in the tradition of oral literature, is conveyed to an audience in the form of a story. After the performance an audio recroding of the story as it was told live will be played in the exhibition space as a material of the performance generated. In addition, a written version of the story will be published and presented at the end of the exhibition period.
Brown is based on a scientific hypothesis: the existence of a “brown note”, an ultrasonic frequency which is supposed to have a laxative effect on humans. Carlos Valverde’s research is founded on this hypothesis and seeks to build a device which, once installed in the room, he can use to try to find this frequency.
The piece’s powerful spatial presence creates a meeting point between technology, mysticism and representation; various layers of knowledge that are formally intermingled to go further than the first line of action.
