Ducan Whitley

G.D Parada

A sound project centred on a small amateur football club, Grupo Desportivo de Parada, in the town of Parada de Ester (Castro Daire, Portugal). G.D. Parada is very much a source of local pride, playing in the top tier of Viseu’s regional league structure (Divisão de Honra).The project set out to explore the signifcance of G.D. Parada within the community of Parada de Ester, through detailed soundscape work focused on the team in training and incompetition. Recordings at training sessions involve a variety of stereo and multichannel recording techniques to capture the sounds of training drills and exercises. The project had a first residency in October 2008, which preliminary results were presented as a sound and video installation in G.D. Parada’s club house, preceding a ferce derby match against local rivals Lamelas. In a second residency, additional sound and video recordings were made and a fnal multichannel sound and video installation will be conceived, in order to be presented in contemporary art exhibition spaces. The project was conceived as a modest phase of research/work that could be carried out within the framework of a four-week residency at Binaural/Nodar in September 2008. I had been researching and working with football crowd sound through binaural and multi-channel sound recording for a number of years, and I’m still working towards a major sound work for a football stadium. The problemis that this takes some time: football club’s in the upper divisions of England’s football league are entities with massive business concerns, not to mention that they are understandably protective of their public relations. G.D. Parada was an opportunity to investigate some of my core interests in football, place and sound, on a diferent scale and in a diferent context. Most of my recent work has in common a process of feld recording and archiving to explore ritualised activities or events, be they social, religious or otherwise. And in all of this work the formal aspects of presenting recorded sound are a central line of critical investigation. Being amateur football in Portugal, particularly in rural areas, a world considered as being poor,less noble, with players of dubious quality, without proper infrastructures, I think what this project can bring is a more nuanced, delicate picture, that may not always be in accordance with these kind of generalized ideas about a place or social arena. It gets more interesting when you begin to look or listen to the details. The importance of, and passion for, football that I observed in the people connected with G.D Parada made a big impression on me.They are no less serious about their work than I am about mine. Initially I was interested in the kinds of relations that might be revealed between the supporters and the club. This particular dialectic had been a feature bubbling beneath the surface in my past project “My Only City”, which documented the last matches of Coventry City F.C. at their High feld Road stadium, during what turned out to be a difcult season and on the eveof the club’s move away from “home” to a new out-of-town stadium. In fact, what became quickly apparent through working at Parada, particularly at their training sessions, was that the relationships between the staf and players were key to the character and image of the club.

The relationship between the club and supporters seemed to have a lesser role, albe it that ticket sales must at least play a small part in the club’s finances. I think the sense of this club “punching above its weight” in the top division of the region, with very limited resources, is very interesting to look at once you get inside the club, and listen to the people. My approach was to explore how sound recording could reveal the relationships, between players, staf and place for example, that make the club the way it is. The fieldwork was carried out across two, one-month residencies, a year apart. From the beginning the staf and the players were very open to our presence among them, and I think they had a kind of respect and curiosity for what we were doing. In the second residency (in 2009), perhaps because of the interest we had shown in returning to come and do more work with them, we had much more interaction with the coaching staf and players and it enabled a diferent kind of work. We were making video recordings of matches for the coach, which was a resource for analyzing games that perhaps he hadn’t been able to use before. We did some really interesting interviews, particularly with the team’s captain and the coach, and these shifted the focus of the project because the material was becoming quite nuanced. In the end you’re looking fora point of exchange, beyond the fact that you’re aiming to collect material for a project, so the exchange itself can have as much value as what gets shown later in a gallery. All the recording sessions were carried out with two stereo mics, in various confgurations in relation to each other according the nature of the training exercises we were recording. So there are always two fairly distinct perspectives recorded, but they are clearly related. In the editing for the installation that took place at the Serralves Museum (Oporto, Portugal), I was trying to maintain this sense of two distinct perspectives using two sets of stereo speakers, but also to create a coherent space between them. So I’m trying formally to create two distinct stereo images in the installation, but in the process (re)creating an immersive space between them that an audience can navigate. This immersive space is the harder part toget right, it takes a lot of editing to arrive at something that feels realistic. The use of more than one microphone position, more than one perspective, means that you can capture the detail of things happening simultaneously in diferent spaces. It ofers some beautiful possibilities also interms of movement, and one of the things I’d set out to do, was to try to capture a sense of the choreography that you can see in the game of football. I’m interested in the formal aspects of presenting recorded sound.In most of my recent multi-channel projects I’ve been exploring the relationships between “recorded space” (the sense of space that is encoded ina sound recording), the installation space where the recording is played back, and space in which the recording was originally made. So far this has meant using the same number of channels in both recording and playback. I’m trying lots of diferent things, and I think it’s a very fertile area in terms of “realist” aesthetics.

The video to be included in the finalwork of “G.D. Parada” is an additional layer of information that changes the ways that the sound can be “read”. I think this information can provide clues that can help to focus the act of listening,and enable the sound to resonate, in a metaphorical sense. I’m also transcribing dialogue from the recorded training sessions into text, which again is a way of focusing attention on certain kinds of details. Finally it is important to mention the role of the hosting organization in every step of my project. Following my initial enquiries, it was the Binaural/Nodar team who identifed Grupo Desportivo de Parada as potential collaborators in the project. Binaural/Nodar had therefore done a certain amount of work prior to my arrival, with regards to working with the football club. Their in put in terms of helping me to understand broader context in which this football club exists, was important to the project. This level of support was present throughout the two residencies, and the process was quite interactive between us. Binaural/Nodar have an existing know ledge of the region, and a passion to know these places better, that makes these kind of projects possible, even on quite a short time-scale.Beyond this, and in addition of his more obvious role as a mediator for the project, Luís Costa (coordinator of Binaural/Nodar) worked with me as a sound assistant on every single recording session. As a result he was very much “inside” the project, and I think that shows something about a desire to really understand the artistic process.

Duncan Whitley studied BA Hons Fine Art at Kingston University from 1996 to 1999, where he worked almost exclusively with sound installation. In the following years his work continued with a focus on site-specific interventions, producing work in both sanctioned art spaces and ‘non-artspaces’ (from domestic environments, to derelict flats, to Church of England churches). From 2004 his practice shifted towards stereo and multichannel ‘field recording’, developing a significant archive of project-specific phonographic studies. His sound recording work documents the ritual of social events: the highly formalised Semana Santa processions in Seville; football spectatorship across different tiers of the British football league; the controlled demolition of high-rise flats in cities around England and Scotland.