The three-author art group presents its media installation project, inviting the audience to participate in the game and, at the same time, to listen to contemporary opera. “During the pandemic, we encountered something total. This was happening simultaneously in many spaces: humming the membranes of social media, flooding the smell of chlorine in entryways, and sticking to the cellular level, bypassing consciousness. If metaphors are the best available way to find an approach to reality, which ones could we use to describe this shared experience?”
Part of the communication within this installation takes place in the space of music, where false statements are impossible; the rest takes place in the space of language and forms, where the consciousness needs to separate meaning from noise and recognize manipulation. The libretto that underlies the work is created in the genre of documentary poetry and is composed of quotations from private and public messages, as well as verbs used by the president in addresses to the people; verbs produced by the virus in relation to the cell; and verbs describing the daily physical and emotional labor of women. The structure of this eclectic score references compositional techniques from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque and musical minimalism, and engages the technique of artistic melodeclamation.
Within the installation, musical patterns take sculptural form, which immerses visitors in a type of listening that is close to meditative or religious practices. The sculptures involved in the installation have a pleasant surface to the touch, on which guests can sit while listening to the opera, can lie, sway and crawl on it.