MAITE DE ORBE
SER DE BARRO
Sound (Max Msp), video, performance
London, UK 2021





As soon as you see it it is gone, a possible description of time, of something which exists yet it is ungraspable. Of that which, non-material, becomes material when embodied in ourselves, as we see it we swallow it, it becomes part of us. An undecidable process we can only surrender to, the basic structure of existence. This project is an exploration of how time, materialized in experiences that are then archived as memories, come into the shaping of our identities and the expression of the same in behaviors, movements, and voices. The base of the investigation is the random evocation of memories into the present moment. Such as Proust’s description of smell in ‘In Search of Lost Time’ which was key to the conceptualization of the term ‘involuntary memory’, wonders about the triggering of lived experiences, through this performance piece, I have aimed to explore the inner narratives that bring us to behave in a certain way. With a background in photography, my research has focused on making this medium fluid, inmaterial and non-objective. My claim is that objectivity does no exist and that we can only attend to the listening of diverse subjectivities that, along with ours, will help us to create an understanding of our environment. If photography is about time, I have aimed to explore this same subject in other mediums, specifically sound, video, and performance. Throughout this year, I have trained myself into understanding the symbols of the coding language. In doing so, ‘strings’ have appealed to me from a conceptual perspective. Strings being the type of variable that holds text, an accumulation of (hi)stories. Strings as memory and ways of triggering them. Strings being interwoven to create nodes and networks of perspectives, a possibility to construct new subjectivities that will unveil the tyranny of a supposed objective and universal way of telling and listening. Rooted in feminisms inspired by Paul B. Preciado, Donna Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, Adrienne Rich, and Iris van der Tuin, I have aimed to build an installation structure that would serve as a template to memory telling. As such, I have gone back to my archive (meaning my diaries, phone photos and videos, music listened at that moment, as well as therapy notes) of a specific time, March last year, when lockdown started, and have gathered that information in order to create a collaborative installation that would play with these different formats to talk approach this moment.









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