Sonoplastia

"The idea for this piece arose from the 7th Mercosur Biennial – Grito e Escuta, in 2009, in which I co-curated the Radiovisual show. As a result of the research leading up to the radio project, I wound up becoming involved and delving deeper into the universe of sound.

In that same year, in a niche underneath a staircase at Galeria Millan, I created a small installation, As paredes têm ouvido. The idea was to create a situation to be heard and imagined ('ouvista', i.e. a Portuguese portmanteau of heard-seen created by the poet Augusto de Campos), featuring a lonely, dazed character in a closed environment, going up and down stairs and uttering nonchalantly from time to time, 'Es-tar em si só por es-tar sal-ti-tan-do so-bre as sí-la-bas do si-lên-cio' (being by oneself just for being leaping upon the syllables of silence).

The monologue could be heard directly through the wall by the 'spectator/listener,' creating a situation of sound voyeurism. The sound was edited at different ‘heights’ and volumes in order for it to become spatialized, giving off the sensation that the character was moving in an ample, eventful environment.

I started my work for Sonoplastia by ‘harvesting sounds’ from conversations and sonorities heard at random in my dailu life. I usually call this phase the ‘big ear moment.’

Based on fragments of texts heard that were removed from their original contexts, on recreated loose sentences and unusual imagined and/or real situations, I conceived ‘sound scenes’ to be completed and realized by the imagination of the listener (auditeur).

In the installatio,n I do vocal performances and create various ‘characters’ – male, female, children’s voices – that are somehow allusive to the realm of the performing arts.  

I decided to use a system in which people put glasses to their ears and press them against the wall to amplify the sound emitted through it. This resource was inspired by games from my childhood, when I used to surreptitiously overhear other people’s conversations and sounds.

Another situation I explore is the choreography that arises from the motion of listeners’ bodies as they listen to the sound scenes, from points located at different heights along the room walls.

Since the beginning of my career, I have worked with the various aspects of language. My first experiences, in the mid-70s, originated from words and photo-performance, and were influenced by concrete poetry, whose concepts, multidisciplinary vocation and dialogue with other artistic languages pointed out different possibilities and directions for me to explore. I tried to expand into the verbivocovisual1 aspect of language, always seeking a poetics that would contemplate the verbal, the sound, orality and the visual.

As I began to reflect about sound, I realized that it is often underestimated in relation to image (except for music, of course!). Sonoplastia attempts to subvert the hierarchization between visual and sound languages. Through sound, listeners imagine and build their own stories."
 

Lenora de Barros in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)