The proposed work takes off from the sound cosmologies, languages, voices, and vibrations of other worlds. These sounds occupy and infiltrate spaces, structures, buildings, walls, and emblematic architecture, producing dissident and underground sonorities that are invisible from dominant narratives and manifest as a sonic uprising. Through three movements – underground (the silence of what is unseen), flood (humidity and the weeping that make matter fertile), and uprising (the slow transformation of matter and the plurality of voices in a multi-species chorus), the artists investigate a cycle of various long-acting natural forces that promote structural transformation, while also pointing to contact between the human and non-human, and between inert and living matter.
In a context of end-of-the-world narratives, »What is Not (O Que Não Está)« provokes the possibility of types of contact that trigger new perceptions of listening to what is absent, and to narratives, bodies, and technologies that survive disasters. Contact is born as a friction of worlds, by composing and decomposing through difference – between what is captured and uncapturable, fixed structures in confrontation with wandering sonorities.
The work is commissioned as part of the CTM Radio Lab, which since 2014 has commissioned new works that explore the intersection of radio with live performance or installation within the context of the festival’s yearly theme. The initiative is led by CTM Festival and Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Radio Art / Klangkunst in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and The Wire magazine.
Next to its premiere at CTM Festival 2022 as an installation, a radio version of »What is Not (O Que Não Está)« will be broadcast via Deutschlandfunk Kultur's weekly Klangkunst programme on 18 March 2022. The work will also be presented by the ORF Austrian Broadcasting Service via one of their platforms: the ORF Zeit-Ton or Ö1 Kunstradio shows, or the ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst festival in Graz in autumn 2022.
Commissioned as part of the CTM Radio Lab, led by CTM Festival and Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Radio Art / Klangkunst in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and The Wire magazine. Produced in collaboration with Tieranatomisches Theater.