“Pipes” in Alentejo is a sound composition created within the framework of the artist residency "Sonoscultura (2024)" promoted by Oficinas do Convento, in Montemor-o-Novo, and directed by Ricardo Jacinto from OSSO.
This residency was attended by the six artists selected in the annual Grants and Residencies Call: Mariana P Coelho, Margarida Albino, Claire Nichols, Madalena Matoso, Rocio Calvo, Paulo Morais.
“Walking around Montemor-o-Novo, where there is a magnificent silence in the streets and where time seems to pass pleasantly slowly, after a few listening sessions, drawings and notes, we started recording the sounds around us.
On that morning, with the headphones in my ears and the recorder in my hands, silence prevailed. However, a continuous and annoying noise insisted on emerging. I followed it. It was coming from inside the walls. I got closer to the sound, which gradually occupied the entire sound spectrum that I could reach. Electricity, I discovered!
The sound came from the electrical cables structure, and reached its peak next to the digital advertising billboard. I tried to ignore it, but this was the sound that imposed itself and kept me from listening to the calm atmosphere of the city.
I moved away far enough to avoid it. At a distance, I heard the different birds echoing in the landscape, sheep in the background, dogs, insects. In front of me, a wind vane made of tin whose sound becomes the strings of a guitar joining the medieval festival in the castle above.
Water. Unpredictably, raindrops were abundant on those summer days, a time of dry weather in the Alentejo. The water running through a tap becomes a continuous sound and joins the sound of the electricity cables. They run together through the city.
The birds interrupt. So do the sheep's bells.
Silence. Cicadas. Roosters. The wind.
A creaking door.
Metallic sounds. Metal strings from abandoned musical instruments.
Sounds flowing through pipes.
The drums of a medieval festival in the distance.
The old piano, stored in the worksheds.”
Water. Unpredictably, raindrops were abundant on those summer days, a time of dry weather in the Alentejo. The water running through a tap becomes a continuous sound and joins the sound of the electricity cables. They run together through the city.
The birds interrupt. So do the sheep's bells.
Silence. Cicadas. Roosters. The wind.
A creaking door.
Metallic sounds. Metal strings from abandoned musical instruments.
Sounds flowing through pipes.
The drums of a medieval festival in the distance.
The old piano, stored in the worksheds.”
In this sound composition, I pulled out the sounds from inside the electricity cables. Instead of ignoring them, I took them on as part of a silent landscape where even the electricity can be heard.
I tried to organize the sounds I found in this place, combining them, creating rhythms, dynamics and harmonies, with the intention of reconciling, in an almost musical way, the relationship between the heritage of a cultural tradition and experiences linked to the countryside, and the emergence of modernity and new technologies.
Alentejo, in Montemor-o-Novo, a place where the sharing of ancient cultural traditions and the search for contemporary solutions intersect.
Above, a stereo version of “Pipes”, the composition that was developed to be reproduced in a multichannel system through resonant sculpture-objects found in the Oficinas do Convento, and presented in the collective exhibition “Sonoscultura” at the Galeria Municipal de Montemor-o-Novo in 2024.
(see > Projects > Sonoscultura)
