Singers room from Jorge Macchi on Vimeo.
The Singers' Room
Video and sound installation
. Video projection on 4 glasses 160 x 100 cm each. Whispering windows audio system.
700 x 100 x 250 cm.
Music composed by Edgardo Rudnitzky.
Duration: 7 minutos
Video composition and edition: Gustavo Quinteiro
Recording of the voices at Estudio del Arco, Buenos Aires.
Recording technician: Osqui Amante
Phonetic
Singers: Karina Antonelli, Gabriela Ferrero, Micaela Piccirilli, Muriel Santa Ana, Cecilia Zabala.
University Gallery, University of Essex, England.
(Fragment of a letter by Jorge Macchi sent to Dawn Ades, curator of the project Light music.) :
"There is a work named Canción a tres voces a diferentes profundidades (2004) (song for three voices in different depths) that consists in three layers of translucent paper mounted on a black background with white empty scores drawn on it. The papers have holes in a way that some of them pass through the three layers, some through two layers, and some through just one. Because of it there are three levels of intensity in the color of the dots: black, medium grey and a color that is almost the same of the paper . Although there is no music related to this work, it can be seen as a three voices song, each one of them identified by a level of grey. Since I showed the work to Edgardo we wanted to do something with this idea. Then Edgardo told me about the whispering windows (to use sheet of glass as speakers) and we started thinking about the possibility of using it in relation to the song. First we thought of a structure with four layers of glass with white dots projected on them and producing a sound every time they appeared and from the glass they appeared. The interesting aspect was that you could listen to the piece and perceive physically the space (to allow the letters to be projected on the right glass the glasses will be sanded in stripes). The next step was to project white letters on the glasses, and in this way to produce a text that could be read in four levels. We needed a very simple text and then this poem by the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño came across:
Here
from afar
I erase you.
You are erased.
It is very simple but intense, and even the pyramid visual structure of the poem was convenient for the piece. Then Edgardo suggested working with female voices. We were not sure about what they might sing, but we didn’t want the singers to sing the text. Finally we decided the singers to sing the sound of the letters every time they appeared on the different glasses. The letters will appear and disappear playing with the idea of erasing the text. Here I send you two images of the video. The different colors are just to identify the level and they won’t be visible, it will be just white letters on black: from back to front the colors are blue, black, red and green. The glasses are 160 x 100 cm and they are 90 cm far from each other."