It is worth noting that these musical pieces are new acousmatic creations, which, despite their almost holographic treatment, do not seek to recreate the city's soundscape in the 18th century. They merely aim to make us think about it, given that reconstructing the past is impossible, especially the sonic past due to its ephemeral nature, a Herculean task, likely of no interest. These pieces come to life from descriptions of activities that took place in the area, which undoubtedly gave rise to rich sonic universes. Every possible element inspired the selection and manipulation of sounds in these pieces, aiming to harness their morphology to emphasize the musical shapes resulting from the overlappings and sequences that appeared entirely at random in the creation process. The complexity of the compositions lies in the interactions between the various sounds, creating rich multidimensional textures that, though imagined, dwell in the consciousness of the listeners, transcending classical time and space, celebrating our roots in the belief that music is a space where the past projects us beyond the present.
'Les traces no són els fets' (2023)
Multifocal Acousmatic Performance • 18.30 • 20.09.2003
Josep Manuel Berenguer
The 16 speakers installed at the Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria's archaeological site for the installation "To Dwell Means to Leave Marks" resonate in the acoustic space of the Rec Comtal sector with a sonic meditation on the impossibility of reconstructing the past. As soon as the sound leaves us, its influence and everything it signifies seem to also vanish for us. This serves as a poignant allegory for the inevitable transformation of how we perceive the events alluded to by history, the distortions of our historical perception of the past, and the fleetingness of its images, so crucial to Walter Benjamin, the author from whose texts both the installation and this multifocal acousmatic performance draw inspiration.
We cannot reconstruct the precise details of a vibrant daily life brimming with soundmarks erased by the very people evicted by the Bourbon monarchy's command. The sounds of not always legal games in the trinquets, sometimes contentious (ball games, dice, chess, cards, jackets, ...), the activities at the butcher's shop, the violin strings, carpentry, blacksmithing, and boiler-making, or the water from the Rec flowing in and out of homes via aqueducts, sewage systems, extracted by people from wells, the chirping birds, and the footsteps of people on the stone pavement will never return. Yet, we can evoke them with contemporary sounds that build evocative landscapes, making us ponder their importance and what their disappearance would signify to us.
Bernard d'Espagnat laments the existence of a veil between reality and us, existing outside time, space, and substance. Marks are not facts, just as 'the map is not the territory', as Alfred Korzybski pointed out, nor does 'articulating the past historically mean knowing it “as it really was,”' but rather 'grasping a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger', because, as Walter Benjamin also illustrates, 'the past can only be captured as an image that flares up and disappears in the moment it's recognized'.