036 Urban Songline (A Greenhouse Sonarium), 2016 – Lisboa Soa, Tapada das Necessidades – Lisbon, Portugal

In this exercise I interpret Brian Hulse’s concept of the Sonarium as an integrated experience of sound not only heard and felt in the body but integrated with memory, an acute temporal experience of observations and an anticipation of future associations using the greenhouse of the Tapada das Necessidades in Lisbon as a physical body; the inside and the outside, its shell sonically semi-permeable.

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The collector-responder-storer is placed in- and outside of the glasshouse in the Tapada das Necessidades. Outside it functions as exterior-ear receiver gathering environmental sounds, drawing them in as they present themselves. Inside the glass cupola the responder-storer reacts to the sounds transformed inside of this body. The Sonarium is the collective sound-based experience perceived > collected > processed > stored > retrieved > re-experienced > influenced > re-processed > re-stored > repeated.

This system applies to memory as it is continuously fed-back by experiences outside of the system (body) that are then ‘incorporated’ in the body-as-memory-container. Movements during dance work with these ‘additions / layers’. As the inside of the Greenhouse (Sonarium) is the inside of the total sound-experience, the outside of the greenhouse (where the plane, the bridge and the foghorn are) functions as collection-space of new experiences and the ‘retorno’ as the feedback-loop into the system.

The planes flying over the greenhouse trigger the ‘retorno’; a return and in Brazilian-Portuguese returning a person to the place he once came from or the (stage-) monitor that returns his voice to himself. The amplification and random pattern of the planes within the Greenhouse where they can be spotted relates to a suspension of distance and time of the listener; elsewhere and return.

The recording of the performance was then broadcasted into the environment via FM radio completing the cycle on in- and externalization of the sound/experience.

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Part of the project Urban Songlines, a utopian/dystopian series of collaborative translations of buildings, urban structures and public spaces into music through site-specific sound-generation. These performances are a way of connecting to places by listening to them as well as a research into how we use and experience the public domain and to what degree we can claim ownership over it, discussing notions of inclusion, becoming and belonging.

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036 Urban Songline was commissioned for Lisboa Soa organized and curated by Raquel Castro.

Dancers – Bruno Humberto, Gustavo Ciriaco and Alexandre Magno Manso.