A festival that celebrates sound, music and audiovisual experimentation as well as the research, promotion and advocacy of the sound arts, with an innovative perspective linked to the use of electronic and digital technologies.
Curated by: Jorge Haro and Leandro Frías
In 2023, Escuchar [Sonidos visuales] [Listening: Visual Sounds] will celebrate 25 years of uninterrupted activity. The main event of the year is the festival, to be held in August at the Museo Moderno Auditorium, with concerts, talks, activities for children and DJ sets. The annual program will be complemented with digital offerings, including sound and audiovisual content that will be released on the Museo’s digital channels; a new edition of the In-Situ project, which will bring together sound and audiovisual artists to create original pieces based on the sounds and images captured in the museum building and the San Telmo neighbourhood; new episodes of the Flexible podcast; and playlists inspired by the exhibition A 18 minutos del Sol [18 minutes from the sun].
The Escuchar [Sonidos visuales] programme will create a dialogue with the contents of the different exhibitions at the Museo Moderno as well as with its digital programme, which commemorates 40 years of democracy in Argentina.
You can enjoy the programme at our Spotify profile: : https://spoti.fi/3r5GzIa
This first 2023 publication is an audiovisual work by the artist Marcelo de la Fuente that can be seen on the museum’s YouTube channel.
IN-SITU #7: Nòmos, by Marcelo de la Fuente
An audiovisual essay about Györgi Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique pour 100 métronomes. 2023, video.
Ligeti composed Poème Symphonique pour 100 métronomes in 1962, during his brief participation in the Fluxus movement. It is the last of his event-scores created within that group. To do so, it was necessary to install one hundred metronomes in a room, and ten performers under the instruction of a conductor, who set them going simultaneously, with different tempos, and then leave the room together with the conductor. The piece comes to an end when the last of the metronomes stops working. This work is rarely performed, given the difficulty of assembling the hundred metronomes.
During the year of the centenary of the Hungarian composer’s birth, I decided to revisit this piece. I analysed its sound aspect and studied different films of his occasional performances in order to obtain a visual reference.
The title Nòmos comes from one of the words that makes up the word metronome. This term, in ancient Greek, means “law”, “rule”, it is also associated with “justice” and was even used to designate the divisions of a territory. Thus, mètron-nòmos is the measure administered by a law: a “just” division of time, produced here by a mechanical device.
For the test I only had two devices. This limitation became a dogma, a principle from which I had to reach the one hundred metronomes of the original piece. I decided not to place, as in Ligeti’s proposal, such number of items in the same space, but to place them in groups of varying numbers in different places within the same architecture, in order to appreciate the resonant characteristics of each environment, as well as to be able to carry out a study of the relationships between the unstable rhythms that emerge from a partly controlled randomness.
I called each of these situations “events”, in relation to the performative act of placing the two metronomes, recording them and changing their tempos with each displacement within the same location. The final result attempts to achieve a score composed of these event-scores developed on a timeline.
Some of the events coexist with a spectrum: the audible permanence of absent images.
Nòmos is, ultimately, the staging of an illusion, the recording of a flow of alternate events, all governed by the pulse of machines.
Marcelo de la Fuente (Buenos Aires, 1962) Visual and sound artist, curator, researcher and teacher. He holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA). He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Argentina and abroad, and concerts in Argentina and Uruguay. In 1996 he was awarded the Stipendium des Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst (Aachen, Germany) and lived in Germany until the end of 1999. In 2002 he received a scholarship for the Research Workshop in Cultural Management of the TRAMA Project. In 2007 he was awarded a residency at TEG (Taller Experimental de Gráfica, Mexico City). Between 2000 and 2008 he worked as a curator at the Centro de Exposiciones de Arte Contemporáneo La Casona de los Olivera (CABA). In 2010 he received the “Courants du Monde” grant from the French Ministry of Culture and completed a residency in Paris. He worked at the Visual Arts Directorate within the National Ministry of Culture. He is currently in charge of the Research Department of the Museo Casa de Yrurtia, part of the Ministry of Culture. His work appears in various publications, including Poéticas contemporáneas (Fondo Nacional de las Artes), Diez años de videoarte argentino (Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, ICI), Imágenes, relatos y utopías (Trama), Hasta la victoria stencil! (La Marca Editora) and Argentina: el arte actual II (Quaranta).
Playlist #1: Ficciones de la ciencia [Fictions of Science]
This playlist presents a selection of original and repertoire music drawn from classic, cult and commercial science fiction films, from the second half of the 20th century and through to the 21st century. It features composers who experimented with electronic sounds, such as Louis and Babe Baron or Eduard Artemyev; Romantic composers, such as Johann Strauss; 20th century composers, such as Giörgi Ligeti; and film score composers such as John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Vangelis and Hans Zimmer.
The selection responds to the exhibition A 18 minutos del Sol [18 minutes from the Sun], soon to be unveiled at the Museo Moderno.
Playlist #2: Cosa cósmica [A Cosmic Thing]
Berlin Cosmic Rock / Kraut rock
This playlist will take you on a tour of Berlin Cosmic Rock, Kraut Rock and their offshoots. In this trip to the 1970s, expansive soundscapes meet hypnotic atmospheres fuelled by rock, electronica and experimentation. Listen to tracks by Popol Vuh, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, ¡Neu!, Ash Ra Temple, Faust, Klaus Schulze, Cluster and Cluster & Eno.
The playlist is inspired by and accompanies the exhibition A 18 minutos del Sol [18 Minutes from the Sun], which we invite you to view at the Museo Moderno.
Caption: Painting (detail) Raúl Lozza, Pintura n. 15 [Painting No. 15], 1945, oil and enamel on plywood, 87 x 69 cm
Playlist #3: Fuerza gravitacional [Gravitational Force]
This playlist includes a selection of musical pieces that relate to the stars, taking different optical and aesthetic points of view. It includes songs as well as rock, ambient, electronic and orchestral music that go beyond our atmosphere.
The playlist is inspired by and accompanies the exhibition A 18 minutos del Sol [18 Minutes from the Sun], which we invite you to view at the Museo Moderno.
Epígrafe de obra visual: Gyula Kosice, Formas en distensión cinética [Forms in Kinetic Distension], 1958, perspex and bronze, 53 x 42.8 x 5.5 cm
Playlist #4: Escuchar [Sonidos visuales] [Listening: Visual Sounds]
This playlist is a preview of this year’s “Escuchar [Sonidos visuales] [Listening: Visual Sounds] Festival”, with albums by Raúl Minsburg (Entre sueños [Between Dreams], Qoa (Achiyaku) and Bahía[In]sonora (Bahía[In]sonora). The selection also includes albums by Beatriz Ferreyra (Canto+ and Echo+) and Nicolás Varchausly (Speaker Performing Kiosk / Live sessions, Vol. 1), two artists who participate, respectively, in “Flexible” ‒ the Escuchar [Sonidos visuales] interview podcast – and “IN-SITU” ‒ the museum’s sound and audiovisual creation programme.
In addition to the playlist, we invite you to visit the links that will take you on a journey through the works of other artists who are also part of the festival’s programme ‒Lu Rizzo, Federico Lamas, Lucas DM, Daniel Nijenshon, Carlos Alfonsín, Faviola Forteza, Marcella Rapallo, Sebastián Verea‒ and “IN-SITU”: Marcelo de la Fuente
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“Escuchar [Sonidos visuales] [Listening: Visual Sounds] Festival”: Friday 25, Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 August
Museo Moderno Auditorium
FLEXIBLE. Podcast #1: Interview with Daniel Nijensohn
FLEXIBLE is a space to converse and think about music, the sound arts and their social, economic and political contexts. Here we present an interview conducted by journalist, poet and musician Gustavo Álvarez Núñez with the legendary DJ Daniel Nijensohn. Forty years after democracy was restored in Argentina, and in dialogue with the exhibition Cultura colibrí [Hummingbird Culture], on show at the museum, Daniel and Gustavo talk about the evolution of dance music and the spaces where it is represented, both in the City of Buenos Aires and its surroundings, touching on subjects such as different ways of dancing, the nightlife, fashion and all the new, weird hairstyles that appeared over the years.
Gustavo Álvarez Núñez (Buenos Aires, 1968) is a journalist, musician, poet and music director. As the leader of Spleen, he was part of the underground Argentinian rock scene in the second half of the 1990s. In 2016, he released his first album, Tierra baldía [Wasteland], under the alias GAN. He has published five books of poetry. In 2015, he published his first fiction, Vidas epifánicas; three years before, in 2012, he published a book of conversations with Daniel Melero, Ahora, antes y después: Por una biografía posible. In 2020, a book of essays on rock music Éramos tan modernos, and the year after, a collection of poems, El sillón y la cama. He recently shared an EP, Discontinuo, [Discontinued], marking the unexpected return of Spleen.
https://www.instagram.com/gustavoalvareznunez/
Daniel Nijensohn (Buenos Aires, 1951) is a professional DJ. In his early childhood, used to listen to the music his father had on a “custom-made super stereo”. When he was older, he took over playing the music at his friends’ parties and literally hasn’t stopped since then. His job and the motivation behind his extensive professional career have been to find new music every day. He is an inescapable influence in the world of rock and, crucially, for electronic music in Argentina. Whether it’s behind the decks or behind the counter at the El Agujerito record shop, Nijensohn has exerted his subtle influence over the year on the scene and spread his devotion to new sounds.
https://www.instagram.com/daninijensohn/
https://www.mixcloud.com/danielnijensohn/