Artists: Mario Verandi
The sound installation by Mario Verandi The Neighbouring Shore is built from four literary and musical threads: a text by foremost writer Julio Cortázar and three popular songs which reside in the collective memory of Argentina.
These four threads are woven to form a sound fabric that evokes places and moments gone in time. Displacement is populated by memories, and this piece, constructed by Verandi from the experience of living far way from home, forms a subtle chain than links us to the other side.
The four successive soundscapes or postales sonoras - as the artist has called them - are composed using as material a variety of recordings encompassing man made and natural sounds from four specific locations in Argentina. Verandi favours real world sounds in contrast with synthetic sounds. These materials range from man made sounds - such as those produced by taping diverse objects like a bottle, a glass or a table - sounds from the natural world -such as birds wind and water - to musical instruments. He records them onto digital media via microphones to later manipulate them on a computer using music software tools.
The Neighbouring Shore was developed at the Electroacoustic Music Studios of the University of Birmingham. It was premiered in the exhibition The Neighbouring Shore - La vecina Orilla, held at the Bolivar Hall in London in 1998.
Aural stimulation is a powerful key that opens the doors to hidden memories: a song can bring back the whole array of emotions of a past experience including minimal details such as the intensity of light, the smell of food, or the touch of a loved one.
The association between the three songs and Cortazar's excerpt with the sounds is structured in time and space focusing on spectral, metaphorical and referential relationships.
Within his musical collage, Verandi weaves all the threads that make the fabric of life a rich mixture of lived and imagined moments.
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The Neighbouring Shore
1998 Sound postcards in four channels. Courtesy of UECLAA
(University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art)
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