Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024

[d]espacio

Series of acousmatic pieces inspired by four avant-garde buildings

music | video art | architecture | wine

[d]espacio: acousmatic series on four architectures. Music | video art | architecture | wine is an multi(inter)disciplinary spectacle conformed by four fixed media pieces and video projections composed between 2009 and 2012. The avant-garde buildings of four Spanish wineries closely inspire the four pieces. These wineries have been designed by four renowned contemporary architects: Electronic Study, based on Bodegas Protos designed by Sir Richard Rogers; Extrusion, based on Bodegas Marqués de Riscal by Frank Gehry; S A H, based on Bodegas Ysios by Santiago Calatrava and De la luz y del espacio, based on Bodegas Qumrán by Hernández/Solís (Konkrit Blu Arquitectura – Barcelona). While music is diffused through a surround speakers system, images are projected on the main screen of the hall. The four pieces in this recital conform an organic whole and they are played continuously without gasps between them.

[d]espacio refers to spatiality (on space), meaning that each one of four pieces explore the intervened spaces attending to different strategies, insofar as they recreate within the concert hall the spatial illusions of the wineries by modifying as the conditions as the numbers of elements –speakers- involved. On the other hand, the word despacio (Spanish, slowly), understood as an adverb, underlines the gradual, organic development of the pieces, according with the idea of extended time within the sound composition.

This philosophy around time tries to establish an equilibrium between composed time (abstract matter as such) and time attached to sound materiality, which tends to establish its own temporal inertia, generally being independent of composed time. The evolution of materials contributes to lay down an organic relationship, not only present at the interwoven mental field of the pieces of the [d]espacio series, together with their respective major cycles, but also at the conception of the series self. It evolves seed/anti-rhythm-like, taking as a reference the first piece, Electronic Study, to compose the whole series.

This meeting between architecture and music aims to continue a universal interdisciplinary artistic tradition, barely explored in History. This path begins in Florence in 1436, with the collaboration between the architect Brunelleschi and the chapel master Dufay, and is not materialized again until the XX and XXI centuries: 1958, Le Corbusier/Xenakis/Varèse (Philips Pavillion, Brussels); 1978, Xenakis (Diatope, Paris-Bonn); 1984, Nono/Piano (Prometeus’ Ark, Venice-Milan); 1995, Nono/Isozaki (Akiyoshiday, Shuho-cho, Japan) 2004 Spuybroek/van der Heide (Son-O-House, Son-e-Breugel, The Netherlands). These are some of the few milestones upon this subject.

[d]espacio photo album Flickr