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‘Sounding spaces’ workshop: final presentation
Directed by JOHN GRZINICH
(Participants / performers:
Eamon Sprod, Andrés Rivera, Guely Morató,
Michel Poblete Montoya and Sebastian Vega)
Tsonami festival.
Valparaiso, Chile.
07-12-13

Review by David Vélez

I

Last December I was invited to the Tsonami sound art festival in Valparaiso Chile to perform a concert and participate in a forum about sound art and recordings. This festival was a great opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences with other people from similar fields, and also to see/listen to their work.

Among the many interesting and enjoyable events that I attended during the festival, probably the one that impressed me the most was the final performance of the workshop ‘Sounding spaces’ directed by John Grzinich.

II

The day of the event I arrived to the SDC facility with some other people; we were first asked to close our eyes, then we were walked into a space with a very nice reverberation where we were invited to sit down and remain with our eyes closed.

Then it all begun…

…first some beautiful rattling sounds…

…then the rattling sounds sounds started to bounce off the walls and floor, filling the location with crisp sonorities and textures that allowed me to have a very special lecture of the space.

…afterwards the sounds subtly faded incorporating the environmental sounds into the action…very powerful…

The presentation continued with series of grave deep sounds that emerged from nowhere; later the floor started to resonate and vibrate…

…a multitude of different and intense sounds followed up creating a loud and chaotic sonority allowing me to completely unlink the sounds from any possible causality…

…and then the marbles started to roll across the floor to end it all…

III

The performance was scripted with drawings and coordinated with gestures. All, or at least most of the sounds were produced manually. The large room was completely filled with sounds as the six performers managed to maximize the acoustic potency of the objects and reverberation.

In no way this could have been done exclusively with speakers, and in no way this could have been done by one person, or by people without the sensibility for of the dynamics of time, sound, and space.

The resulting work of ‘Sounding spaces’ is a great example of how to fully employ the potency of collective work with sound, offering to everybody involved (the spectators, the director and the participants) a very significant experience.

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[John Grzinich and the workshop participants]

John Grzinich website
Tsonami website

David Vélez

David Vélez (PhD) is a Colombian sonic artist studying the acoustics of food, working in the intersection between sound ethnography and plant bioacoustics. His work oversteps the boundaries of installation art, field recordings, composition, performance and commensality exploring gardens, kitchens and open food markets as exhibition spaces. Vélez is interested in the strategic artistic possibility of sound and its invisible, immersive, unstable and fluctuating material, attrubutes shared with the nourishing transference of energy in food.