Mirrors, wood, loudspeakers, spotlights, computer, sound and electric cables, haze.
July to August 2019, Convento São Francisco, Coimbra. Commissioned by Dar a Ouvir, Paisagens Sonoras da Cidade, programmed by Jazz ao Centro Clube Educational Service with Coimbra Municipality/Convento São Francisco.
This recently renovated cultural centre was the location for a textile factory for much of the twentieth century. We worked in a small room at a crossing, a closed space with three doors connecting other rooms. Except for a coat of arms painted in the domed ceiling, the room was otherwise almost featureless. This piece was created to break with the space and time of the room, creating a plane that ripped the floor and using sound sources that oscillated between friction and synchrony, stability and temporality, chaos and harmony. The history of the convent and its multiple occupations — spiritual, industrial, and cultural — inspired the piece, that juxtaposed sounds of mechanical looms and other processes in the manufacture of cloth, and fed from reflections, both of the lights, the room, and the visitors, as of the sounds it projected towards the very reverberant space.
Thank you to Adriana Ávila, Catarina Pires, Márcia Carvalho.
