Falta, 2010
Falta captures the sound of a blade being sharpened and was recorded in digital format – a sound module repeated in a loop. The object, meaning the CD itself, should be considered as much a part of the work as the recorded audio.
The surface of the disc is equally reflective on the front and back, that is, none of the sides have added adhesive, engraving, dyeing and/or painting.
Without having one of the sides of the disc identified, as it is double mirrored, the CD can be placed in a player on the side on which it is not read by the machine, thus not emitting any sound. The only data that identifies the position of the CD so that it can be read correctly by the electronic device is the relief of the transparent area through which our index finger passes when we manipulate the object, surrounded by grooves.
During the process of constructing the doctoral thesis entitled Parte, I considered that this exercise of reflection could perhaps also be the locus for the presentation of Falta, attached to the body of the thesis. It was, moreover, a work that emphasized the meeting of distinct temporalities, arising from the rare opportunity that a thesis project at an art school could provide.
Falta required that the sound of the blade being sharpened was rhythmic in a pendulum manner, like the ticking of a clock, in a kind of duo: a and b, a and b, a and b, and so on indefinitely. With the collaboration of musician Ruriá Duprat, sounds of homemade knives rubbing against a stone were captured in his studio. This sound, repeated exhaustively, reached a kind of mantra, a monochromatic abstraction. I decided that this almost infinitesimal back-and-forth movement would be exhaustively repeated in the compact disc emulsion process.
When deciding on the loop – as occurs in the other works collected in Parte – time was not taken as something linear, but as uninterrupted transit and displacement. Falta can expand beyond the volume of the thesis, be made available with headphones, in a more contained relationship with the spectator/listener, or even raise relationships with architecture, in this case being presented on speakers and amplifiers with apparent wiring “slicing” the walls of an empty room.
In Falta, I am interested in the images suggested and, in some way, projected by sound. It is as if the work, which takes the “body” of the thesis as physical material, could also happen in real time: it is as if it were happening. What would be desirable would be for this monotone composition to be heard at high volume, and for its repetition to lead to something like a trance, something close to the paradox of Bataillian ecstasy: “that the subject must be there where he cannot be, or vice versa, that he must be absent right there where he must appear”*.
Thiago Honório, 2010.
*
MATI, Susanna; RELLA, Franco. Georges Bataille, filósofo. Florianópolis: Ed. da UFSC, 2010, p. 18.
Work Details
Falta [Absence], 2010
Silver double-sided compact disk and recorded audio
photo: Edouard Fraipont
Exhibitions
Incompletudes, Galeria Virgilio, SP, 2010