DISCIPLINES

Audiovisual installation
Phonography and sonic art
Acoutic ecology
Performance
Music composition

CONCEPTS

Singular-collective dynamics
Communication
Memory
Cultural identity
Emergence

PLACE

Galeria do Sol
Rua Duque de Loulé 206
Porto, Portugal

DATES

OPEN DOORS
August, every day
from 2 to 6pm
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EXHIBITION
24th August - 2nd September 

TAXONOMY

Funchal 2017
I have always believed in the methodological (and even therapeutic) benefits of throwing away everything possible. On the other hand, my work evolves ever more complex, and so, the ever longer and denser pre-compositional processes start to amass. So, and due to a major influence from my father, who is an antrhopomusicologist,  today I have archived nearly a thousand documental fragments, including notation studies, instrumentation lists, scripts, scenic plans, drafts, graphs, tables, diagrams, maps, matrices, syntactic systems, functions and calculations, translation and sonification schemes etc.
 
TAXONOMIA interacts with local artistic communities, with whom I share the collection, so that issues to do with the functions of signs and symbols in human communication are explored. Concepts such as notation, interpretation and improvisation are approached, whilst realisation, concretisation, materialisation, sonification and translation processes are tested. Additionally, there is space reserved for discussion and negotiation of notions of necessity, utility, efficiency and intelligibility.
 
In regards to the physical installation of the work, initially, the space starts empty and blank. Day after day, the walls become gradually filled up with drawings. One by one, and mediated by a conversation, these are interpreted and recorded by local musicians. The recordings are edited in-situ and positioned with multiple loudspeakers in accordance to each respective drawing. The piece’s shape thenceforth advances organically through the walls, gradually filling the room with the memory of everybody’s participation.

THE STATE OF THINGS

Funchal 2017
Throughout the period of two weeks, various musicians from or living in Porto are invited to an interview on their first musical memory, the most memorable and the most recurrent; always associated with a place. Finally I ask for the sound they find most remarkable in the city, which I then go on to record, collecting a growing amount of phonographic material which is later reinterpreted by other musicians.
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Throughout the days, the material starts moulding according to the participants, whose answers are recorded and recombined in various forms, producing new dynamics as more arrive. In this way,  a mapping of what is most relevant to each one, and inevitably to the whole, is created. Various loudspeakers are hanged from the ceiling of the space in relation to the spacial coordinates marking the entire floor with a scaled map of Porto. Little by little, the audience is able to witness the development of a space that receives the expression of a community of a time and place, whose identity is marked by the artistic practices as well as the sociocultural experiences they hold alive.

This work focuses on the recovery of information through various types of memory one can activate. Particularly, this includes episodic memory, dedicated to autobiographic events linked to a time and space, and associated with emotions and other contextual criteria such as who, when, where and why. Also procedural memory, which does not base itself on the conscious return of memory, but on an implicit learning, activated, for example, in the act of doing something such as playing a musical instrument.

RODRIGO B. CAMACHO

SARA RODRIGUES
I have been described as a composer of strange music, which you should approach only with adequate alertness. The various contacts with sociology and political sciences have irremediably transformed me. I do find pleasure in thinking systematically, in a detailed and acute fashion.

​I am interested in language and transformation processes, with which I articulate everything I can from the conceptual kernel to the more superficial aesthetic levels.

​At times, it can be said I live after violent, and somewhat brutish ways. Nonetheless, the complexity and interrelatedness of everything have always fascinated me.
After having studied fine art as well as music, my creative interests became centred between research and audiovisual composition. Many of my current pieces are created with, or thinking of, people, an attentiveness awakened as I began composing for specific musicians; some of my friends and acquaintances. I was not only interested in their musical capacities, but in the value that resides in the personal characteristics and individual experiences, in each one’s life story.​

My pleasure for malleable and open structures took form in compositions with macro structures that fill themselves with unique pieces of content and life. I recurrently attempt to understand complex questions through dissecting them into small fragments, employing techniques such as action-prompting questions and options with indeterminate consequences. With an ever-growing anthropological and sociocultural interest, I’ve been trying to understand how art can intersect and affect daily life.