Resistance

1. The act of resisting, or the capacity to resist.

 

At the beginning of 2020, a microscopic virus stopped the world in its tracks.

During several lockdowns most of us have all adapted our consciences and inertias, our habits and obsessions in the daily life. Particularly in my case, as I belong to the CEV (Clinically Extremely Vulnerable) along with almost 4 million people we had to be shielded practically most of the time. Undoubtedly, the word “Home” has taken on another meaning, and is now situated in another dimension.

It has become a refuge, a kind of sanctuary that has the specific texture of security where you feel calm and safe. A place of resistance.

“The Resistance” was born as an artistic response to this experience.

 

But the pandemic is not the focus nor the theme, but the context and pretext of a poetic exploration of my own isolation, encapsulated with the scores of sound sensitivity.

 

The narrative of the piece is the loneliness of the individual, the physical distance with others, the stillness of movements, the oppression of space. But also, the perfection of calm, the satisfaction of being in the moment, the fullness of the subject merging with the object, the unity of space. It analyses also that liminal state, where time itself loses its intentionality and it explores the perception of being present in both time and space. In that "there and then" the place is the time and the time is the place and that is true.

It is presented as a sound sculpture. Through an exercise deconstruction and reconstruction of the year 2020, the piece is configured within the space as something more than half a circumference, formed in turn by another 53 circular sculptures of polished stainless steel forming a total of 13 towers. I was interested in creating an intimate space for the viewer, a piece that delimits the public and private space through its form. From inside the semicircle, the landscape is homogeneous and static and only we and our reflections activate it. I used the repetition of the reflections and their cumulative disposition to offer us the unity of space, full of small fragments of our self, multiplied and distorted in infinite spaces. In this way I present the viewer as an integral element of the work, strengthening the relationship between the object and the subject and symbolically exploring presence and absence.

The sound material is an exploration of my own space through a total of 366 field recordings arranged in 12 speakers forming the same semicircle.

I shaped the layers of the real sound using the different frequencies, depths and temperatures, to create a perverted sound experience, on the border between fiction and reality, that served to establish a message, to tell a story, and to take the observer into a new field of exploration.

The soundscape plays in a loop, without fulfilling an opening or closing function, that gives us the feeling of an intermediate state, the contention of time, the sense of physical certainty, of a permanence.

The 12 speakers are placed along the piece forming an immersive environment through the semicircle of the structure and the sound is not exclusively addressed to the ears, but it involves the whole body through the path of the piece. The sound waves bounce off the metal walls and their subsequent resonances act in such a way that the whole piece emerges as an expansion of three-dimensionality, in which the axes in which the materials are organized are no longer exclusively internal to the own work, but also external to it.