A Disembodied Voice, Towards Love.

How to be without being?

How to go on creating situation, present tense?

Sound as a medium of dematerialisation. What do we perceive from a piece of performance art when we don't see it and only hear it? Could we ever perceive the space where it is performed and the image it produces? When does the body disappear? Is the voice body?

The perception of love as a sign. Until when does language operate more as a suggestion of the real? Can language be activated as a sign of something that has not yet found its words?

As a way of answering these and other questions, we have turned to the format of the radio programme, for its capacity to create contents through practice and shared processes of knowledge, and above all, for its capacity to create a present or another present. 


The radio suggests, or at least allows one to believe in, the notion that someone is at the other end of the microphone. The desire to find a space-time continuum with the person the narrator is addressing. As Manuel Cirauqui rightly says: “The intensification of the here and now, a paradox for strengthening the relationship with someone we cannot see, someone who is always there and thus inhabits a maybe”.
This experimentation is in no way related to radio as a medium, as a laboratory, but as a place where performance “rests” or leans, thus seeking the validity of the sign in its transfer and adaptation to this different format.


We believe that when the displacement between what happens and what one perceives –which normally occurs through sight–is only perceived by way of the sound it makes, it poses interesting questions on the notions of performance.


This experience activates the practice of the relations produced between the immaterial object and the spectator in the area of performance and the development of some of these elements outside their presential mode, to the benefit of more discursive modes.

 

 

Blanca Calvo and Ion Munduate



Call for applications open until 5 September./Una voz sin cuerpo, hacia el amor [A Disembodied Voice, towards Love] is the title of the programme to be offered from the 4th to 11th of October in San Sebastian as part of Special Issue, a networked European programme. The network comprises Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, In-presentable (Madrid), Station (Belgrade), Hybris Konstproduktion (Stockholm), BIS (Istanbul) and Mugatxoan (San Sebastian), structures created by artists to produce suitable contexts for an art that is in the process of being invented. We begin with the question “In what way does today's performance publish discourse?” and go on to ask: How to be without being? What does one perceive from a piece of performance when one only hears it, without seeing it? Could one ever perceive the space where it is performed and the image it produces? When does the body disappear? Is the voice body? To answer these and other questions, we have made up a programme, consisting of presentations and two workshops given by Manuel Cirauqui and Peio Aguirre, which will raise theoretical and practical reflections on issues related to these themes.
A Disembodied Voice, towards Love named this programme as part of networked European programme called Special Issue. Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, In-presentable (Madrid), Station (Belgrade), Hybris Konstproduktion (Stockholm), BIS (Istanbul) and Mugatxoan (San Sebastian), structures created by artists to produce suitable contexts for an art that is in the process of being invented. Emission 1. A Disembodied Voice, towards Love, is a radio broadcast programme including performances, lectures, conversations and interventions, which are simultaneously performed, in Salón de actos de STM and in a free radio, through the presentations by Cristina Blanco, Manuel Cirauqui, Peio Aguirre, Alice Chauchat, Juan Domínguez and Itziar Okariz. The idea for the radio programme emerged from the interviews with the artists who have passed through Mugatxoan in the last ten years. The interviews sought to reflect the places, position and autonomy from which they worked ten years ago and where they are now. The vocabulary of an encounter quickly emerged and the terminology used to depict and express situations and the work processes of each one was also defined and discussed. This caused us to turn our attention and purpose to the sound medium due to its intangibility, while considered the setting up of a line of publications tackling the problem of "translating" an artistic process into the written word.
Last November, the Arteleku premises were flooded by the heavy rain and, therefore, the scheduled programme had to be moved to other centres. In our case, and thanks to the support of Artium, we moved to Vitoria in December and San Telmo Museum is now hosting Mugatxoan with the second episode of the When the Body Disappears project.
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