RES 109/2021 is a sound piece composed with recordings and digital manipulation of songs by birds species declared as invasive in Argentina. It seeks to generate an interactive experience that invites reflection on the value of life, our impulses for control and censorship, and the inconsistencies and dichotomies of our relationship with nature.
The sound piece is made up of the manipulation and superimposition of multiple recordings of these “invading” birds, generating continuous tensions that refer to the incoherence of our control and censorship impulses, in the face of the boundless freedom of these birds. The baseline sounds proceed from field recordings made in different natural reserves of Buenos Aires state or isolated birdsongs gathered from opensource libraries. The songs of these birds are deformed and reconfigured, in an attempt to reconvert their harmonies into abstract and mechanical sounds, producing a parallel with the way in which we try to manipulate the nature of these species, so that they do not adapt to anything more than what we consider which is your place.
The installation is presented in an interactive format that invites the public to play and manipulate the position of the loudspeakers on an abstract map, drawing both makeshift paths or borders with the connecting power cables. On a screen, an animated graph presents the intersections that are established between the native species and those decreed as illegal between Argentina, Spain and Portugal, asserting through the playful crossing of raw data, how our current relationship with nature is permeated by its consequent processes of adaptation to our dominion.
RES 109/2021, Interactive installation, composed of a 45 min sound composition, video, grid chalk drawing, and a set of speakers with long cables mounted on moving skates.
URRA Residency Center, Tigre, Buenos Aires, November 2021
This work was made in Buenos Aires with a residence grant from the Community of Madrid, and belongs to a series of works whose artistic research was supported by the Ministry of Culture of Portugal.
Presentations:
La luz que atraviesa los cuerpos, collective exhibition, URRA Tigre, Buenos Aires, AR