Exhibition catalogue: Vivian Caccuri - A Soul Transplant

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9 February - 7 April 2019 #rรถdastenkonsthall www.rodastenkonsthall.se

VIVIAN CACCURI A Soul Transplant

9 February - 7 April 2019 Curator Mariangela Méndez Prencke Röda Sten Konsthall

VIVIAN CACCURI uses sound in her installations as a vehicle to combine experiments in sensory perception with issues relating to histories of colonisation. A Soul Transplant is a sound and light installation, exploring stories about the interdependencies between humans and mosquitoes.

In Caccuri’s delirious myth, it was only right after the loss of their immortality and unlimited collectivity, that humans started to experience fear, love, anxiety, courage, ambition, a sense of belonging, loneliness, a sense of time, and so on…

In A Soul Transplant, Vivian Caccuri proposes a narrative to re-bond with these insects whose buzz is hated by our ears. The installation refers to a mythical past where humans were immortal and without singular personalities, indistinguishable among themselves like termites or rice grains.

But the spirits of malaria, yellow fever and other arboviruses entered the mosquito body, turning them into killers of humans. And what could be seen as a tragedy, became instead the rise of the individual.

The composition for A Soul Transplant was written by the artist and recorded during a residency made in collaboration with Resurscentrum för konst and Studio Acusticum in Piteå (a part of Swedish Lapland Artist in Residency). Played mostly in the dark in a multi-channel largescale sound and light installation, it combines human voice, pipe organ, mosquito sounds and wind instruments.

VIVIAN CACCURI was born in São Paulo, Brazil, 1986. She has developed projects in many cities in Brazil and abroad, including Manaus (in the Brazilian Amazons), Accra, Detroit, Helsinki, Vienna, Venezia, Kiev, Valparaíso, New Mexico, and many more. Throughout her career she has collaborated with different musicians such as Arto Lindsay (USA/Brazil), Gilberto Gil (Brazil), Wanlov (Ghana) and has recently released her first musical project (Homa). Her sound works and compositions have been broadcasted in radio stations such as Resonance FM (London), Kunstradio (Vienna) and Rádio Mirabilis (Rio de Janeiro). Vivian has participated in the 36th Sao Paulo Biennale (2016) and in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018). At Princeton University she wrote her first book Music is What I Make (2012), published in Brazil and awarded by Funarte Prize of Critical Production in Music in 2013. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

A Soul Transplant, 2019

Sound and light installation Duration: 20 minutes

Over Skin, 2019

Opening performance 9/2. Live piano prelude played by Sven LidĂŠn and a voice intervention by Vivian Caccuri telling about mosquitoes, the surge of yellow fever and malaria, and stories on how these insects fell in love with the human blood and sugar.

Drawing by Vivian Caccuri

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

CONVERSATION with Vivian Caccuri What is A Soul Transplant about?

A Soul Transplant is a sound and light installation that combines the sounds of various instruments, human voice and the buzz of mosquitos. There is a large-scale totemic sound sculpture in the center of the exhibition hall Katedralen that concentrates most of the mosquito sounds, and there are six speakers placed around the space where the composition that I wrote at the Studio Acusticum in PiteĂĽ plays.

Studio Acusticum, photographer: Fredrik Broman

The composition is based on music from the northeast of Brazil, especially music for flutes typical of this region.

The piece takes place in the dark, but the music is synchronized with the lights of the Katedralen to create occasional flashes of colors.

I researched stories from people that experienced hallucinations through the diseases brought by mosquitos, such as malaria and yellow fever, which inspired me to make a composition more based in sensations and memories than a logical narrative. There are very thin threads hanging in the room that touch people’s skin creating a contrast between the delicateness of the touch with the force of the sound.

Why is the mosquito the protagonist in your recent works?

The mosquito is a very unfortunate and interesting fact of our reality, deeply connected to our bodies, our past and the way we think of ourselves, our cities and nature.

At times, the mosquito behaved as a paramilitary front against external forces that aimed to take over a specific region or context.

The local population could be already immune or resistant to their viruses or parasites, while foreigners would die in the first week. That was much more common centuries ago, when communities were more isolated and people did not travel as much as they do now.

With the recent zika and dengue epidemics in Latin America (interestingly, zika and dengue came from other parts of the planet), the mosquito—and consequently, Latin American nature—has never been so despised as now. But if one digs into history, it is possible to understand that it was the sugar that the Americas provided to the world, produced by enslaved Africans, which created the right environment for mosquitoes to multiply and thrive to a point of no return.

These were some of the factors (plus the high temperature and tropical storms...) what made the “sweet Americas” perfect for the arboviruses such as yellow fever to erupt. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean in the 17th and 18th century, sugar was keeping the Western world high and relaxed, energetic and possibly fat with unhealthy teeth and polycystic ovaries.

Nowadays, sugar and mosquitoes are all over the planet, both are considered epidemics and threats to our health.

IT IS HARD TO THINK OF A MORE AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL INSECT THAN THE MOSQUITO.

Drawing by Vivian Caccuri

The deforestation caused by the production of sugar, created swamps in Brazil and in the Caribbean. The harbors that shipped the products were filled with stale water and the ships that brought people from everywhere, had hundreds of drinking water tanks where larvae were likely to be swimming in.

For these and for many other reasons, it is hard to think of a more aesthetic and political insect than the mosquito.

Vivian Caccuri at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018

What type of sounds are you interested in? Or, of all the sounds out there, why you chose the ones present in this composition?

For example, right now, yellow fever has made a come-back in Brazil; what a powerful correlation with our political misfortune of having elected a fascist president.

The mosquito is a frail creature floating in space, absorbing and synthesizing all that the human body has been through for the last thousands of years, taking the blame for the harm that we did to it and to the environment.

The best illustration of this is how we now hate the sound of mosquitoes, we loath it to our guts. Wisely, humans seem to have developed their musical ear by having the mosquito as its anti-model.

I’m interested in all kinds of unwanted sounds. Not exactly what the modernists and sound experimentalists take as “noise”.

These modernist “noises” are still the sounds of ruling structures, as they very often come from the productive or polluting machines, voluntary or involuntary recordings of nature or civilization that also involve hi or lo-fi machines and imply positions of power. I’m interested in sounds that have been put into a subaltern position due to a specific social / political / historical reason or context, independently of their source. They are the most revealing, aesthetic and meaningful to me. For example, I have worked with baselines that evolved from the drums that since long have been removed from Christian church music, I have also worked with trunk sound systems that have been chased and confiscated

by Brazilian municipalities and now with the noise of mosquitoes.

HUMANS SEEM TO HAVE DEVELOPED THEIR MUSICAL EAR BY HAVING THE MOSQUITO AS ITS ANTI-MODEL.

In the composition, I also incorporate passages of the Brazilian composer Ernani Braga. Engenho Novo and O’ Kinimbá are folk chants from the Brazilian Northeast that address the sugar plantation landscape and the syncretism of musical cultures that happened in this environment.

This installation is an experiment to see how all these elements function or not function together: mosquito sounds, folk music and traditional church instruments such as the pipe organ.

Why is sound your chosen medium to convey all this?

Sound is my favorite medium to address the body in a very immediate way, as it reaches the skin, the internal organs, and our psychology. I’m equally interested in all the reactions that have little to do with all the theoretical research that structures my work, because sound triggers the most personal and instinctive at the same time.

Expecting predictable reactions destroys the very reason of working with sound and music.

Mosquito Shrine by Vivian Caccuri at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018

The folk musical forms I’m working with—the “pífano” bands of Northeast Brazil— are also the sounds of the “unwanted”. They evolved during the Portuguese colonial times when sugar was being grown in the region and a subaltern population—indigenous, black slaves and peasants— developed their own devotional music, independently of the Catholic Church, who protected church music from the common people. “Pífano” evolved from European medieval forms, indigenous Brazilian flutes, and West African rhythmic structures.

And it was born during the same period as when the first epidemics of yellow fever broke.

INTERESTED IN MORE? DON’T MISS...

WEDNESDAY 6 MARCH

Guided visits with the exhibitions curator, at 17-18 Artist talk with Ditte Ejlerskov, at 18-19 Ditte Ejlerskov is an artist whose inner voice has acquired a life of its own, exposing her thoughts and intentions, her gaze and her ambivalence as a white European woman. At RĂśda Sten Konsthall she will talk about painting, the independent life of representations, but also about artificial intelligence and particle theories.

The talk and the tour will be in English.

WEDNESDAY 27 MARCH

Guided visits with the exhibitions curator, at 17-18 Talk Sound of the underground. On the relationship between visual art and music with Geir Haraldseth, at 18-19 Music plays a big role in the field of contemporary art, but is this role limited to avant-garde and experimental tendencies? Is there any room for the popular, the danceable and musical theater? And where is the body in all of this? Geir Haraldseth, curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, will do a quick shimmy through the interconnected world of art and music, with a particular focus on popular music.

The talk and the tour will be in English.

Tue, Thu & Fri 12-5pm Wed 12-8pm Sat & Sun12-6pm