Video score for Santa Cruz da Trapa
The video begins with a spoken introduction and follows with a photo montage that serves as the piece’s score. This montage is composed from a series of changing images which alternate against a black screen. The pictures, taken during walks in the surroundings of the village, form the basic working material of the score. As the piece progresses, the rate of alternation between the images and the black screen in creases, following a structure comparable to that of a ‘Rondo’ form.
Through out this form, the voice over remains present–offering an ad hoc explanation of the internal structure of the score. The text is bilingual. It alternates between English and the local language of the place where the work is performed (in this case Portuguese).
The piece has an open instrumentation, with a minimum of 2 performers required. Playback consists of a click-track on the left channel (for rehearsals only) and on the right channel asound track with recordings from around Santa Cruz da Trapa supporting the voice over. The basic principle of the piece is for the performers to move or make sound during the sections of black screen and then to be still and silent while the images are displayed. However, the left corner of each picture includes is a black square which can be interpreted freely via sound or action without taking the pictures into account.
Lilia and I came to this concept while thinking through what it means for us, as artists living incities in Belgium, to come to such a beautiful, bucolic village in Portugal. Our first, primal reaction was to collect sounds and images of the landscape. Later, we tried to find a way of ‘performing’ our impressions of the material after it had been digitized. The Rondo form offered a cleat grid on which these impressions – as sound and movement – could play out.
When we arrived in Portugal, both Lilia and I were exhausted from the everyday (working) life in the city. Starting the residency with a series of long walks amplified the feeling of being on a holiday. In the second part of our stay, we began to develop the idea of making a score. We had much more mental space in the residency context than we would have at home. It doesn’t seem likely that we would have been able to finish the piece in such a short time span at home. Not only did the lack of daily responsibilities generate new energy for us both, we suspect the vastness of the rural landscapes opened up a different feeling of time. Even now, months after the residency, this wider, three-dimensional perspective still lingers in the brain as a promise that our working atmosphere at home is an exceptional situation and that the rural landscape is the real working space of the artist.
Frederik Croene (1973) is a pianist / composer / teacher based in Ghent, Belgium. He is perpetually investigating what it means to be a classical pianist in our contemporary context. He founded the concept of Le Piano Démécanisé, a dismantled piano, and since then looks to reinvent his instrument and his relation to its tradition. His latest work involves electronics (Roll over Czerny), visual arts (MarsII with artist Karl Van Welden) and conceptual recitals (Mozart Kreidler Mozart, Voyages au bout du Piano).
Lilia Mestre (1968) is a Portuguese performing artist living and working in Brussels. In her work she uses choreographic tools to research the social body. She gives special attention to the agency of all things and has been working in assemblages, scores and inter-subjective setups. Actually she’s involved in two research projects: ‘And what about Virtuosity?’ with Edurne Rubio, Shila Anaraki and Frederik Croene and ‘Choreographic figures-deviation from the line’ initiated by Nikolaus Gansterer. She is curator for projects in Bains Connective Art Laboratory in Brussels and at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies in Brussels).