This year (2011) the Binaural Nodar artists-in-residency program, in the north of Portugal, had as its theme The Voice in rural landscapes.
Due to our shared interest in language and the voice (speaking and singing) we made a proposal to temporarily connect with our voices the villages in the remote mountain landscape of Aldeias de Magaio, which formed the spatial and substantive working area of the residency. Every day, in the course of the 3 weeks of our residency, we went for long walks in order to gather information about the positions of these villages in relation to the landscape and to each other, their relative distances and the connecting roads and paths.
From all this, a route developed along which we could use our voices to make connections between villages and between places in the landscape. Although we daily trained our voices, we chose not to try out the acoustic possibilities along this route until the two performances that we executed on October 1st and 2nd during the festival in which the residing artist's projects were presented.
Our performances started at sunrise and lasted until sunset. We used synchronised digital clocks. On the hour we stopped in different locations on our route and called out loud the number of the hour of that moment preceded by the singing of a repeated fragment of a yodel melody. Now and then we were together in one place, at other moments we took different roads or paths, which resulted in performing our calling out at sometimes great distances from each other, for example with each of us in a different village. Even when we couldn't see or hear each other, we were able to make a connection between two places at exactly the same moment by using the clocks. Although our singing and counting were synchronised to the second, the great distances, the wind or the echoes of the mountains created delays and distortions.
year
2011
location
Aldeias de Magaio, Portugal
brief description
A performance project in collaboration with Myriam van Imschoot. While walking for 2 days along a route of villages, we connect places with our voices.
performed by
Myriam van Imschoot and Toine Horvers
curator
Luis Costa
photography
Rui, Myriam, Toine
further information
sound recordings by Myriam van Imschoot
project or event
Voice scapes, the voice in rural landscapes, Binaural Nodar