2015 » Brazil » Performing Space

Sound of Silence

The critical theatricality presented as an urban identity plays a double role, reshaping the past as a vision of the future and, at the same time, reforming the contemporary cosmopolis as an antique cosmology. The genius loci inhabiting this vernacular mirror was revealed by the convocation as a key for the contemporaneous scenography and, as a time-lapse image, questioned the shared space concept. How the local identities are able to communicate with the global context is, nowadays, a primordial inquiry that we all should be making after the self-named Occupy events spread around the world. From the Arab Spring in 2010 to the “Je Suis Charlie” march in 2015, through the Brazilian manifestations in 2013 or Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Revolution” in 2014, public space is being taken up. Our layered urbanity is deeply investigated by an opposing narrative that is grounded by the collective in ordinary places whose imaginary function was the property of the state or the capital. Such cohabitation strategies are solely possible due to the advent of the space extended by media, whose augmented reality through locative devices turned sensitive cities into reality, articulating presences and experiences. Our intention is to merge the reading of historic discourses and the lecturing of our senses in a multidimensional urbanistic narrative that is invisible in its complexity, yet, nevertheless, manifests in our fruition. Based on the description of an inspirational tour, we invited the actual spectators to present the inaudible thoughts that each person has as a result of the experimentation of a place in your personal presence. We aimed to confront the reading of the historic discourses and the lecturing of our own senses in a multidimensional urbanistic narrative that is invisible in its complexity, yet nevertheless manifests in our fruition. This mapping occurred by means of the recording of ambient sonorities by capturing applications common to the personal devices, like smartphones, tablets or other similar technologies. We generate a digital repository to which it will be possible to upload the sounds captured by each individual, who is also able to geo-reference the archive, building a virtual place for occupation. These charts configure an intricate map of the human presence and experience from architectural and urbanistic places that, athwart a critical theatricality, reveal themselves as performance spaces. Music Weather Politics, that is our SharedSpace: the world that we all occupy and which is composed of our confluence of views per dialogues of silent poetry that our sensibility can collect from the spaciality.

Project realized as individual participation.

Exhibiting artists / ateliers

• Leno Veras

Specialization: media artist, Communications
Additional information: Communicologist, researcher on Aesthetics and Narratives at the Image and Sound scholar field of Communications and Culture Program and professor for the Theory, Criticism and History of Art course at the Arts Institute of the University of Brasília.