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by Irune Serna
    sound shop  
               
 
 
  visionary art  
     
     
 
   
 
  Cielo y Tierra, 2020.  
     
     
 

The binomials inside-out, up-down, matter-energy are the protagonists of this project. If the land art artists “not only distanced themselves from the cities […] but from modernity by trying to connect with nature through ancestral and non-Western cultures” [Lozano (2019)], the material part of this installation has followed that trail. I have abstracted my vital context of sea, mountains, birds and have extended it to a global level where the cubic structure as a Platonic solid alludes to the earth element. This cube houses a sound hemisphere tuned to the vibration of the root chakra, also related to the energy of the earth. If the sphere is a symbol of completeness, the semisphere tells us about the lower half, the earth, compared to the other half, the sky, which is not represented as a semisphere but in the form of sound and images. The water, the most abundant liquid on the planet, inside the bowl alludes to the origin of life contained in a matrix of sound. Under the cube and the bowl, a spiral of sand, inspired by the works of Mario Merz (1925) for whom “if the form disappears, the root is eternal” and his interest in the Fibonacci spiral, symbolizes movement and evolution that starts from the center of the bowl, from the sound matrix of life, passing through the cubic structure and expanding outward. All the elements of the earth are physical and viewed from bottom to top, they are born from the spiral, the bowl, the water and the cube, that is, from the expanding energy, the matrix of life, the vital liquid and the earth in a material evolution exercise.

The synthesized images of clouds, the sound of rain, thunder and birdsong emitted by the television allude to the elusive nature of the sky, to the speed of light and sound. Through the cubic structure we can perceive that luminous and sound reality, but we cannot touch it because it is volatile. Yes, we can approach the bowl and generate our own sound that will make the installation, the metaphor of heaven and earth, transform with our footprint. It is, in the words of Izaguirre (2010), a displacement in which the subject is at the center of the “object” of appreciation, the environment. In this case we have tried to create a new soundscape combining music, birdsong and the sound of rain. Different moments in time and space that come together in the same physical reality that in turn can be transformed again by the human presence and the sound of the bowl.

Murray Shafer's work as a bioacoustician and his creation of musical compositions based on natural landscapes has had a strong impact on this work, where a theme inspired by the element Air has been composed, while leaving it to the human hand to contribute by creating sounds inspired by the earth with the bowl.

 
     
     
     
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