Work
Installation
Silence as departure point
Is an installation project that evolved from an invitation to collaborate by Pilar Tomás Gonzalez, Director of the Semana de Música Religiosa in Cuenca, Spain, a classical music festival; the oldest of its kind in Europe. It was sponsored by the Fundación Antonio Saura through their annual digital art review, Disco duro.QNK. The opening of the exhibit initiated the 2010 edition of the festival at large, the participation of Peter Greenaway closed it, with a movie named The Marriage (inspired by the painting The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese). The film was a co-production of the Semana de Música Religiosa and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy.
The installation included three projectors, 120 images, the video Mountain breath and Aural path, a sound space composed for the project, and incense. The venue where it was set up is the nave of a XVII Century de-sacralized church, part of the Ex-convento de las Angélicas (now the gallery of the Novillo Art School).
The installation . see.
Mountain Breath, 2008. 3 min. video . see.
Aural path, 2009. Audio, 15 min.*
(click circle below to listen, low volume is reccomended)
About this piece:
It started by being an investigation into the possibility of depicting an internal space through the use of sound. Half way through the assembly process, I realized that the piece was an acoustic metaphor for the experience of sitting meditation. When you seek silence through meditation, you will probably encounter a number of elements before you get anywhere close to the absence of mental "noise". These multitude of voices and messages the mind produces, constitute responses to stimuli from external and internal sources (as well as your own body's signals) — become dramatically apparent as you watch the breath, like a parade of "stuff", triggered by your beliefs, expectations, concerns, fears, desires, etc. As you move through this experience, gaps of mental silence eventually start appearing, only to be dispelled by new thoughts that come into your mental space. The idea is to "smilingly" (as S.N. Goenka says), set those distractions aside and go back to the breath. Similarly, in Aural path, there are some constant elements—like the crows or acorns falling on the roof of our home—and a few occasional events, a bell, voices and a boy singing; all being used for their metaphoric (and perhaps visual) value. The result is an acoustical environment that transmits my interpretation of the space I describe above. It is worth mentioning that, as I explored sound banks, I came across the work of Hans Timmermans, composer and professor at the Utrecht School of the Arts, in the Netherlands. His way of processing sound has a quality that profoundly struck me, deciding to integrate some of his sounds to this piece*; you can hear a fragment of his work here.
*in use under the Creative Commons Law / www.freesound.org/