We kept cleaning the whole space up all day again. Amidst cables, ridges, screws, nails and washers, big sacks and little bags, hammers, pliers, pincers and nippers and all those other tools, the visual trash seemed refusing to go away. Gladly, by the end of the day, we managed to dominate it, somehow. We also tested all the loudspeakers and were very happy with the result! We can barely wait to install them all, one by one. We improvised and have experimented a lot with this unusual sound system and, from playing around with it, there came already to our heads some good concepts for our future "band", which, anticipatorily, happened to suffer today a drastic name change already; we were ORAS but now we are RHO. We actually do not exist still… but stay attuned, the next episodes will rock! Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
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With Diogo Castro, Rui and Helena, we dug out the best way to communicate the project to the community of musicians in Funchal, because we want that as much of them as possible come to participate in the project. With a little change in the system's design, and counting with the precious help of four carefully coordinated people, the second sailcloth screen took substantially less time being hung up. With most of the major suspensions, preparations and tunings done, Sara tested her own piece with Rui and Helena, by asking them questions about their personal memories. They very much enjoyed the prospects of being able to revive the music, the sounds and the places which most marked them, and left us looking forward quite a lot as well. As soon as they went away, Sara, who was rather enthused with the thenceforwards opened possibilities, shared with Rodrigo the various methods she would use to symbolise and categorise people's answers in the shape of a huge relational map. Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
Uncle Carlos (Camacho) brought us an industrial stapler to help us with the installation. Before going away, he cheerfully told us about his colleague, to whom he once had to remove one of those heavy-duty staples out of his thumb, which was bleeding like a fountain. For the rest of the day, the discussion about how to hang two huge 6 meters wide sailcloth screens [the support material for Rodrigo's piece 'Taxonomy'] against the walls kept balancing between whether we should use nails or cables. After various collectively clumsy and hence void attempts, and once everyone else went to sleep, Rodrigo hand-built this counterweighted leverage system, which included 18 folding chairs taped in pairs, and, alone, he hoisted one of the screens up to the 2.5m mark. A process which easily took him until the morning hours. Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
We woke up early to embark on a quest for sound cables. In order to be able to properly test them, we bought two types of cables: copper coated fancy ones and those of another type, simply black all around, which soberly won the competition. It sounds ridiculous that we ended up three times in the same store until we managed to buy all necessary materials in order to finally start the installation, but amidst shopping trips, we learned a lot. For example, that there is a difference between a curved screw hook [shrimp type] and a screw eye [piton type], not that this has anything to do with animal taxonomy, despite the piece's title. Lourenço (from the hardware shop up the road) was always around and ready to hand us some help, but it was uncle Paulo (Barbosa) who made us get to the end of the day with a smile on our faces. He came to visit us at PIPINOIR and lent us an hour of that kind of tacit know-how and gave us those perfect tips, which totally transformed the installation process into something much more efficient and quite pleasurable. Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
After two gusty landing attempts on the very gale that is Santa Cruz [a small city where the airport that serves the whole of Madeira Island is built], for a great part of the first day, there we were, opening loudspeaker boxes. We opened about twenty of them, some with wrenches, some with mallets and hammers, and some by kicking them to pieces. With help from Manuel, Eduardo, Rui and Helena, we examined all the equipment and checked our materials up. As everything was brought down here to PIPINOIR, we already started thinking about how the piece 'Taxonomy' will adapt to the space. We acquainted ourselves with the café at the corner - Dona Mécia, which is really nice and surprisingly affordable - and already found some people we know on the streets, who promised they would come back at some point. Now we need to go sleep since it's 5 am already… Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
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