LOCUS IN QUO
An Art Creation by Manuela Barile
About the project
Locus in quo – which means “the place where something happens” – is the general title I gave to a body of works based on a particular theme: the sense of places. The project consists of two video installations + a series of photographs and objects (Pesa and Cá), a sound installation/performance (Birdsoundcage) and a concert performance (Oikos). These components function both as interconnected, independent works and, as a single cohesive work.
About the sense of place
Our feelings, our perceptions, our memories, our life can’t not be told and represented with regard to a place. We are our place, our places: all the places, real or imaginary, that we lived, accepted, rejected, combined invented, removed. We also are the relationship that we have wanted and been able to have with places.
Modernity unhinges the sense of places. It arranges and measures extensions, without dwelling on cultural aspects, on the genius loci of the place, on the memory and tradition, on the aspects of the natural and ecological conformation of the land, on the ritual and sacral symbolizations deposited as signs in the ground and on the ethics of responsibility to people who will come. Modernity conceives place as “a purely geometric volume to fill with arbitrary disposition of volumes”(L. Bonesio) and it is for this reason that today we assist to a geological, environmental and cultural deterioration of the territories. Our relationship with places has changed. Our attitude is farther and farther away from “feeling ourselves at home”, to recognize ourselves as belonging to a specific horizon, which it doesn’t materialize only through the tourist fruition, but it is given by feeling oneself as part of a culture and its traditions that have deeply marked the places.
Goals
In this time the crucial importance of preserving memory and tradition is somewhat at stake. “Locus in Quo” is a project that seeks to contrast this process, providing a multi-sensorial analysis of places, starting from their architecture, both visual and aural, to a reflection on other issues related to cultural tradition and memory.
Types of audience
Locus in quo is orientated to audiences from different age groups and varied geographical and cultural backgrounds, as the aesthetical language used by the artist is simple and rich of symbolisms.
PESA
VIdeo Installation
Pesa (“nest” in Estonian) is a video installation conceived in response to a site-specific performance that I developed at Moks, an artist residency in Estonia between September and October 2008. It consisted on building a nest in several places where I felt a sense of belonging (the abandoned house, the abysses of the lake, the rock near the pond, etc).
To build, to live and to abandon a place where “you feel at home” is the process that I represented in this project. “Feel” for me means “to live” and “to live” is as Heidegger says “to inhabit”. There are places that more than the others remain inside us and are not always those places where we have spent more time.
Places choose us, steal us and mark us. Abandoning these places means leaving the bonds, go out of ourselves, stripped of our certainties.
Pesa describes the approach of a person who leaves with sadness and deep awareness the place to which he is attached, to set off in search of his new “home.”
CÁ
Video Installation
Abandoned villages are aside places that modern societies tend to ignore or want to forget. They are considered to be dead and useless places, a sign of failure. They represent a past that is hopelessly forgotten. Today those villages have not a sense anymore.
Cá is a project that intends to give back a sense to the abandon villages. The abandoned villages are places with a strong identity, are places alive even if they are uninhabited, even if the nature has gradually absorbed them. They are places still alive because full of memory. They are a bridge with the past … our past.
Today our approach with memory is more and more connected with a museological approach that intends memory as storage and not as a continuation.
Memory is not deposited as a series of data available in an archive, which is enough to consult at will. Memory is not a department store where old unusable tools now lie abandoned. Memory is something more: it is a legacy that we are called to accept in view of the future.
In Cá my goal is not to revive the past, but to inherit it in some form. Inheriting the past is to feel ourselves as heirs of that past and to be able to make it once again present and ascribing it new forms. It means to continue what others have left us and make ourselves witnesses of a history to preserve and continue. My aim is to trace, catch and interrogate the signs of life and memory where everything seems over. Tracking the signs of memory means for me to take back our roots to reconnect us to a sense of authenticity that is being extinguished.
BIRDSOUNDCAGE
Sound and Video installation
Birdsoundcage is a cage for birds recreated through the medium of sound in an empty and sterile room. Inside it, there is a body flopped to the ground, completely bandaged, that in order to survive decides to make a custom-made cage made by prostheses. The prosthesis are obtained setting with a white patch twigs of wood on the lower and upper limbs of the body. The organic matter with whom the prostheses are made, is the rest of a nest, a place of the past that no longer exists.
Birdsoundcage is a symbolic place of which we are invited to make sense.
OIKOS
Site-Specific Sound and Vocal action
The house is a place; the house is a metaphor for our body and it is also our little Universe. When we are in our house we fell protected, when we are in our empty house we feel lost. The place-house becomes space again.
In “Oikos”, the performance space is transformed into a sort of house, an empty house, house that is ready to be abandoned. The action takes two planes into account: the vertical one, represented by the walls, the stairs, the building itself; and the horizontal one represented by the floor, the balcony, the landing, the terrace. The wall is a custodian of memories to which the performer gives sound with her voice. The voice wavers between dreaming and waking, between attraction and repulsion. It passes from dramatic and tragic situations to the comic and joyful. The house is both friend and enemy. Prison and refuge.
In terms of tone, the artist’s voice moves from crystalline and subtle sounds (that recall the chant of the sirens, a lone singing bird, etc.) to savage and grave sounds (lamentations, chants of death, etc.). The artist’s improvisation passes from dramatic and tragic situations to the comic and joyful, placing a mirror to the conditions of human existence. The performers voice is heard both acoustically and (on occasions) electro-acoustically. Through the use of contact microphones, both the sounds of her body and the sounds from outside the hall and the building will be amplified and with which the performer will interact. The performer’s body, approaching and moving away from the audience, involves them in a game of distance (near – far away) and direction (high-down/right-left).
Additional Information:
CREDITS
Original Idea and Artistic Director: Manuela Barile
Vocal Performer and Sound Compositions: Manuela Barile
Field Recordings: Manuela Barile, “Birdsoundcage” – Duncan Withley (England)
Video Footage and Editing: Manuela Barile
Spoken Voice: “Pesa” – Evelyn Müürsepp (Estonia)
Singers: “Pesa” – Anna Hints (Estonia), “Cá” – Traditional singers from the region of S. Pedro do Sul (Portugal)
Sound Post Production: “Pesa” – Rui Costa (Portugal), “Cá” – Duncan Whitley (England)
Multichannel Audio Composition: “Birdsoundcage”- Duncan Whitley
Wardrobe: Creazioni Ranieri (Italy), Brazukinha (Brazil)
Art Residencies: Moks (Estonia) and Nodar Artist Residency Center (Portugal)
Production: Luis Costa & Carina Martins (Binaural)
Support: Portuguese Ministry of Culture
LOCUS IN QUO
An Art Creation by Manuela Barile
About the project
Locus in quo – which means “the place where something happens” – is the general title I gave to a body of works based on a particular theme: the sense of places. The project consists of two video installations + a series of photographs and objects (Pesa and Cá), a sound installation/performance (Birdsoundcage) and a concert performance (Oikos). These components function both as interconnected, independent works and, as a single cohesive work.
About the sense of place
Our feelings, our perceptions, our memories, our life can’t not be told and represented with regard to a place. We are our place, our places: all the places, real or imaginary, that we lived, accepted, rejected, combined invented, removed. We also are the relationship that we have wanted and been able to have with places.
Modernity unhinges the sense of places. It arranges and measures extensions, without dwelling on cultural aspects, on the genius loci of the place, on the memory and tradition, on the aspects of the natural and ecological conformation of the land, on the ritual and sacral symbolizations deposited as signs in the ground and on the ethics of responsibility to people who will come. Modernity conceives place as “a purely geometric volume to fill with arbitrary disposition of volumes”(L. Bonesio) and it is for this reason that today we assist to a geological, environmental and cultural deterioration of the territories. Our relationship with places has changed. Our attitude is farther and farther away from “feeling ourselves at home”, to recognize ourselves as belonging to a specific horizon, which it doesn’t materialize only through the tourist fruition, but it is given by feeling oneself as part of a culture and its traditions that have deeply marked the places.
Goals
In this time the crucial importance of preserving memory and tradition is somewhat at stake. “Locus in Quo” is a project that seeks to contrast this process, providing a multi-sensorial analysis of places, starting from their architecture, both visual and aural, to a reflection on other issues related to cultural tradition and memory.
Types of audience
Locus in quo is orientated to audiences from different age groups and varied geographical and cultural backgrounds, as the aesthetical language used by the artist is simple and rich of symbolisms.
PESA
VIdeo Installation
Pesa (“nest” in Estonian) is a video installation conceived in response to a site-specific performance that I developed at Moks, an artist residency in Estonia between September and October 2008. It consisted on building a nest in several places where I felt a sense of belonging (the abandoned house, the abysses of the lake, the rock near the pond, etc).
To build, to live and to abandon a place where “you feel at home” is the process that I represented in this project. “Feel” for me means “to live” and “to live” is as Heidegger says “to inhabit”. There are places that more than the others remain inside us and are not always those places where we have spent more time.
Places choose us, steal us and mark us. Abandoning these places means leaving the bonds, go out of ourselves, stripped of our certainties.
Pesa describes the approach of a person who leaves with sadness and deep awareness the place to which he is attached, to set off in search of his new “home.”
CÁ
Video Installation
Abandoned villages are aside places that modern societies tend to ignore or want to forget. They are considered to be dead and useless places, a sign of failure. They represent a past that is hopelessly forgotten. Today those villages have not a sense anymore.
Cá is a project that intends to give back a sense to the abandon villages. The abandoned villages are places with a strong identity, are places alive even if they are uninhabited, even if the nature has gradually absorbed them. They are places still alive because full of memory. They are a bridge with the past … our past.
Today our approach with memory is more and more connected with a museological approach that intends memory as storage and not as a continuation.
Memory is not deposited as a series of data available in an archive, which is enough to consult at will. Memory is not a department store where old unusable tools now lie abandoned. Memory is something more: it is a legacy that we are called to accept in view of the future.
In Cá my goal is not to revive the past, but to inherit it in some form. Inheriting the past is to feel ourselves as heirs of that past and to be able to make it once again present and ascribing it new forms. It means to continue what others have left us and make ourselves witnesses of a history to preserve and continue. My aim is to trace, catch and interrogate the signs of life and memory where everything seems over. Tracking the signs of memory means for me to take back our roots to reconnect us to a sense of authenticity that is being extinguished.
BIRDSOUNDCAGE
Sound and Video installation
Birdsoundcage is a cage for birds recreated through the medium of sound in an empty and sterile room. Inside it, there is a body flopped to the ground, completely bandaged, that in order to survive decides to make a custom-made cage made by prostheses. The prosthesis are obtained setting with a white patch twigs of wood on the lower and upper limbs of the body. The organic matter with whom the prostheses are made, is the rest of a nest, a place of the past that no longer exists.
Birdsoundcage is a symbolic place of which we are invited to make sense.
OIKOS
Site-Specific Sound and Vocal action
The house is a place; the house is a metaphor for our body and it is also our little Universe. When we are in our house we fell protected, when we are in our empty house we feel lost. The place-house becomes space again.
In “Oikos”, the performance space is transformed into a sort of house, an empty house, house that is ready to be abandoned. The action takes two planes into account: the vertical one, represented by the walls, the stairs, the building itself; and the horizontal one represented by the floor, the balcony, the landing, the terrace. The wall is a custodian of memories to which the performer gives sound with her voice. The voice wavers between dreaming and waking, between attraction and repulsion. It passes from dramatic and tragic situations to the comic and joyful. The house is both friend and enemy. Prison and refuge.
In terms of tone, the artist’s voice moves from crystalline and subtle sounds (that recall the chant of the sirens, a lone singing bird, etc.) to savage and grave sounds (lamentations, chants of death, etc.). The artist’s improvisation passes from dramatic and tragic situations to the comic and joyful, placing a mirror to the conditions of human existence. The performers voice is heard both acoustically and (on occasions) electro-acoustically. Through the use of contact microphones, both the sounds of her body and the sounds from outside the hall and the building will be amplified and with which the performer will interact. The performer’s body, approaching and moving away from the audience, involves them in a game of distance (near – far away) and direction (high-down/right-left).
Additional Information:
CREDITS
Original Idea and Artistic Director: Manuela Barile
Vocal Performer and Sound Compositions: Manuela Barile
Field Recordings: Manuela Barile, “Birdsoundcage” – Duncan Withley (England)
Video Footage and Editing: Manuela Barile
Spoken Voice: “Pesa” – Evelyn Müürsepp (Estonia)
Singers: “Pesa” – Anna Hints (Estonia), “Cá” – Traditional singers from the region of S. Pedro do Sul (Portugal)
Sound Post Production: “Pesa” – Rui Costa (Portugal), “Cá” – Duncan Whitley (England)
Multichannel Audio Composition: “Birdsoundcage”- Duncan Whitley
Wardrobe: Creazioni Ranieri (Italy), Brazukinha (Brazil)
Art Residencies: Moks (Estonia) and Nodar Artist Residency Center (Portugal)
Production: Luis Costa & Carina Martins (Binaural)
Support: Portuguese Ministry of Culture
