Finissage: Instrumentos matado no.1
Copper pipes, saxophone mouthpiece, contact microphones, and various electronics
2024

For our residency Akina and I proposed to depart from sounding paces, pierced flutes, and groundwater effervesce to work on the elsewhere of sound permanences.

Our residency, started by thinking within the framework of Rib's long term program The Last Terminal. For us, The Last Terminal shifts our notion of apocalypse from something hyper-eventful, biblical or mythological, an unavoidable spectacle to a slow-burning present, a threat of collapse on an already unstable ground.

The film ‘Le vent des amoureux’ by Albert Lamorisse served as a kickstarting point to ‘The Last Terminal’. Similarly, we chose a perforated mesoamerican flute as our starting point; a flute that stirs a certain syncopated excess that keeps on being unheard (and keeps on echoing its withdrawal). As brought up by Nicolas Jaar in a 2021 lecture, these perforated flutes are known as instrumentos matados or killed instruments, where the piercing of the object (at the moment of the owner's passing) creates an excess of air that withdraws the possibility of sound. Thinking with this object we are asking what are the sonorous relations of the last terminal?

For the residency period, we worked on the endurance of sonorous relations opening up our research process into objects that make no sound but create relations with sound. In Rib we experimented with relations between objects, paces, and recordings in their malleability as relations regarding sound, but not as sound artefacts.

Using the crawlspace of Rib as our cave, we performed in echo while the audience stood in the gallery floor. Only indication that there was something in the maintenance crawlspace was the cords traveling down. While I used a DIY copper instrument in conjunction with the soil to create noise, Akina translated these echos with a synthesizer board, making everything sound even more distant.

Performance view in the crawlspace

Performance view in the exhibition space

Rib's maintenance crawlspace