Ernesto Estrella
Saturday, 18 April, 2015 - 20:00
FASE 2015 / Ernesto Estrella / Gilles Aubry
18 Apr 2015 - 23:59
ERNESTO ESTRELLA will perform "The Insider"
GILLES AUBRY will perform "Nice Rain – a soundscape of intentions"
ERNESTO ESTRELLA
The Insider (a voice series in 6 episodes)
Enter the mind of a retired customs officer who is being haunted by the memories and experiences of those that were passing by in front of him while he was on duty. A trip through different cultures that will display the precious details of a personal story that is being traversed by unfamiliar accents, narratives and emotions. A story in which the protagonists’ identity is being disintegrated and weaved anew as we advance through the different episodes of the series. During this voyage, inner borders are dissolved and our senses are reborn into an unexpected precision.
Sensitive and voracious, The Insider intervenes into the cultural DNA of our times and presents us with a nomadic identity faithful to the multiple pulse of our daily human being. A search that brings the audience along different routes that do not collide into a defined terrain, but into a community, into a we in the process of becoming.
Episode I: Dance of the Unreadable
Only two years after retiring, the Insider is affected by difficulties in reading and listening. Other languages, sounds, and feelings are appearing in his books, in his memories, and in his daily life. In an attempt to fight this identity loss, he decides to enrol into a dance program, a discipline he had intensely practiced during his youth. There he will find that also his moves are being snatched by unknown gestures and foreign bodies.
Ernesto Estrella is an educator, poet, and musician born in Granada who has lived in New York since 2000. He completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University, and between 2007 and 2011 he was a professor of Contemporary Poetry at Yale University´s Spanish and Portuguese department. Since the spring of 2012 he has turned to Berlin as a second base for his artistic and academic work. Ernesto has authored several books and articles on poetry theory and criticism, and his Spanish translation of Thoreau´s Journals has just been published. As a poet, his latest book Boca de prosas (Prosemouths), appeared in 2014, and is now being translated into English and German. Fragments of his current project, the experimental poem-novel, Escuela de tu nombre, have already appeared in poetry magazines. His multimedia book Achronos was part of CUNY´s Virtual Poetry Project: http://nml.cuny.edu/poetryproject/vpp/index.php/vpp/issue/view/2/showToc. As a musician, he concentrates on the voice’s potential to explore the poetic process through sound. Since his arrival to Berlin, he has become a founding member of the international quartet Berlin Sound Poets Quoi Tête, and he has created a band, Far Beyond Driven, that explores improvisational and compositional possibilities through original tunes.
GILLES AUBRY
Nice Rain (a soundscape of intentions)
Nice Rain – a soundscape of intentions" presents itself as a reflexive soundscape composition. Rather than attempting to sonically depict an existing environment via sound recording as a 'classic' soundscape would do, this piece aims at focusing on the intentionality behind the recording itself by questioning the process and motivations that led to its making.
Concretely, the piece consists in the playback of a field-recording composition over 2 to 4 loudspeakers, along with the live-reading of a text by the author of the piece. The soundscape composition is made of 24 field-recordings made in various places in Berlin, each one by a different sound recordist. The recordists are sound artists and anthropologists who have accepted to contribute to the project by providing one Berlin recording from their personal archive. The text is a composition by the author from the written answers by each of the recordist to the three following questions:Why did you do this recording? How did you do this recording? In what ways does this recording represent your own listening experience?
During the performance, the audience is presented with a double narrative: one of recorded places as an arbitrary sound travel through Berlin and another one of intentional listening experiences described by the recordists. The two narratives are organized according to distinct principles, so that the spoken descriptions don't necessarily refer to the recordings heard at the same time.
In short, "Nice Rain" is a work that refers principally to its own making, as well as to its very reception via listening. As a result, the listener is confronted with a complex listening situation involving both at the same time his/her own auditory experience and the ones evoked successively in the recordists' declarations. The piece further addresses the ambiguous character of the relationship between a place and its hypothetic sonic representation, while at the same time exploring the poetic, sensuous and reflexive potential of recording practices.
The following (ex-)Berliner recordists have provisorily agreed to participate to the project:
Rinus van Alebeek, Mario Asef, Boris Baltschun & Serge Baghdassarians, Rob Curgenven, Peter Cusack, Anke Eckardt, Christina Ertl Shirley, Helena Gough, Andy Graydon, Achim Langerer, Ines Lechleitner, Felicity Magan, Israel Martinez, Anders Lauge Meldgaard, Helge Neidhardt (Tapeman), Udo Noll, Dave Philips, Stephan Roik, Jodi Rose, Fritz Schlüter, Valerio Tricoli, Antje Vowinckel and Kathrin Wildner.
Born in 1973, Gilles Aubry is a Swiss sound artist living in Berlin since 2002. His practice is based on an auditory approach of the real informed by researches on material, ideological and historical aspects of sound production. Frequently combining various audio sources such as location recordings, interviews, multi-vocal narratives, music recordings and archives, Aubry creates installations, performances and 'movies without pictures'. His works typically explore the relational and reflexive qualities of sound and listening while questioning problematic aspects of cultural representations.
This Concert is Part of the festival FASE 2015
FASE is a German‐Spanish annual Festival dedicated to sound art developed in Berlin since 2010, in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes of German capital. The Festival has presented, both in Villa Elisabeth and in Instituto Cervantes venue, an international artists group whose work flows between visual and sound creation, interpretation and improvisation, and performance. In 2012 the festival experimented a growth when the FASE section of Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid was presented into the sphere of the German‐Spanish Music Conference organized by Goethe Institute of Madrid.
In each edition, FASE takes different subjects as main axe of selected works. The starting point of the Festival is a transnational German‐Spanish cooperation to promote Spanish sound art in Germany and vice versa. The main aim of FASE is, then, the creative interchange between Spanish and German artists, and of this ones with their international collegues, with the aspiration of establishing a stable and united framework to sound art development. In this way, the Festival was born this the vocation of becoming in a meeting place and a space to dialogue and reflexion about sound art and experimental music, in debate with related artistic disciplines.