cuaderno 2. ser / traducción

• Cuaderno 2. Ser/Traducción | December 2013. Donostia-San Sebastián

Blanca Calvo + Ion Munduate Sarrera
Virginie Bobin A Letter To Be Translated
Marten Spangberg The Darker Age of Performance and its Subjet
Nicolas Malevé Being/Translation, a Borrowed Glossary

• Cuaderno 1. Una voz sin cuerpo, hacia el amor | August 2012. Donostia-San Sebastián

Blanca Calvo SarrerA
Amaia Urra Frondoso matorral
Alice Chauchat The Love piece
Itziar Okariz Contrariwise
Peio Aguirre Love as production: a short theory of the economy of art

• Cuaderno 0. Cuando el cuerpo desaparece | October 2011. Donostia-San Sebastián

Blanca Calvo Cuando el cuerpo desaparece
Víctor Iriarte Cinco noches
Ion Munduate Antes de sin título, en colores
Sandra Cuesta Versión dibujo sobre Wakefield
Loreto Martínez Troncoso Notas preliminares a partir de mis experiencias más recientes. Del paso de la presencia física y la palabra hablada a la palabra registrada

Following two publications and radio broadcasts in which we explored the breakup in performance between body and voice —When the body disappears and A body-less voice, towards love, we present the third chapter of this series: Being/Translation.

When we thought up this project perhaps we did not know where it was going to lead to, but we were sure that the voice was going to be the vehicle that was going to take us throughout the journey. And we say transfer, because what we sensed is that in that transfer of perception of performance to another medium, both in publications and on the radio, is where we were going to find questions, some with specific answers and others still unresolved.

This is one of the reasons why we chose the radio as a medium: because it allowed us to gain access to the idea of being on the air from the microphone. The articulation between the exterior and interior of the development of the project has also something to do with the way things are changing, with breaking some devices in order to liberate the movements of their own materiality.

We do not understand the voice as being separated from the body; more than anything, the intention was to break away from the image. We needed to see, here and now, from the “freedom” we did not have and so we thought about dodging the present. To execute a movement, to pass from A to B. Rather, the need was “jump over” the present, to hang in another time, in another present.

The choice of these two terms together, Being/Translation, is a logical consequence of the other two titles that provide the framework for the project and because we understand the term Being from the interpretation we make of the “Being Becoming” concept of Gilles Deleuze. In our case (and from a practical viewpoint), we state that we are not here and now, that we move, we travel, we transfer, we transport on a continuous basis. Deleuze begins his Logic of sense by writing:

The here and now is situated in the simultaneity of a becoming whose attribute is to avoid the present. To the extent that it avoids the present, becoming does not support the separation or the distinction between the before and the after, between the past and the future.

With regard to the intention of the term translation, this involves activating a strategy that in its own movement gradually selects the elements that recompose it once again; creating in this way, from matter itself, the embryo or the future working basis. Hence the need to distort certain elements that are implicit in the development of any performance: sound, voice, body, image and representation. The objective of this process is and has been to recognise and open new working spaces, totally in continuity with the interval provided in the process.

For this Notebook 2. Being / Translation we have the contributions of Virginie Bobin, Mårten Spångberg and Nicolás Malevé; and we have maintained the original language in which these contributions were written, which in all three cases is English, with a translation into Spanish at the end of the notebook.

Virginie Bobin takes an intense and exciting look at the work of several artists, films and links to different websites which give rise to a wide-ranging manner of understanding voice and the breakup between body and voice.

Mårten Spångberg writes a manifesto on performativity and that the thing that is rather at stake, now and in the future, “against” performativity, is the inventing of methods, tactics, models, auto-terrorisms, heresies; that cancel, exorcise, redo, destroy, fuck and completely annihilate some aspects of performativity through and through.

Nicolás Malevé invites us to share a glossary in which he tries to concentrate on the description of each word, a short narrative moment or an aspect of a concept. The narrative fragments come from the life of Erkki Kurenniemi, Mouchette (a character in the film by Robert Bresson of the same name), George Kaplan (from the film North by Northwest, by Alfred Hitchcock) and the concepts of the Enciclopedia de Matemática, of L’Imaginaire by Jean-Paul Sartre and Matière Et Mémoire by Henri Bergson, among other sources.

The explored voices, both in the Notebooks and in the Broadcasts, make up a fabric formed by different layers of sedimentation, in which all these voices rest, waiting to be activated, perhaps or at least that is what we hope, in another way. They are also implicit in the statements and attempts proposed by the guest artists. Many thanks for all those voices.

Broadcast 1 ended by inviting listeners to turn the antennas of their radio receivers towards a point on the horizon, towards the sea, to lose the signal from our radio station; with the idea of looking for another place, in the paradox of being there but not being here at the same time. We then recalled the decision of Glenn Gould, when in 1964 he stopped playing live as he understood the music was more useful in a recording studio than in a concert hall. He decided to get away from live performance to continue generating matter and the search for a medium to which he thought the development of “music” was destined. A change so that everyone could choose the way to approach, listen to, and share music.

Therefore we also invite you to listen to the radio broadcasts on our website www.mugatxoan.org as a complement to the notebooks, copies of which can be requested from this e-mail address info@mugatxoan.org

Broadcast 0 and Broadcast 1, two programmes with performances, talks, interventions and concerts, which are broadcast solely by pirate radio within a 1.5 km radius and which now contain 18 hours of live broadcast on the website.