session 5
ESTER XARGAY
presentation
Music setting guidelines for image
Canadian composer and video artist Jean Piché says in his book De la musique et des images: “Electro-acoustic music is a very particular kind of abstraction: we create musical material in the studio, just as a video editing studio is the place where images are created”. It’s for this reason I’m presenting this video session as an audiovisual concert with musical electro-acoustic compositions by Mercè Capdevila and Miquel Àngel Marín. These are visual compositions that invite you to listen to the image; the sound provides guidelines for the movements of the visual elements that appear.
Five of these pieces are collaborations with Mercè Capdevila: Sostres, Sorra de temps absent and videopoem Licantropia integrate the composer’s music in my visual or text-based work, while the other two, Pigallat and Clar i net, are images I have created to be screened while the music, one of her concerts, is played live. With Microdanses, a collaboration with musician Miquel Àngel Marín, there’s a four-handed play with two instruments: the clarinet and the camera.
ESTER XARGAY
Sant Feliu de Guíxols 1960. A writer and video artist, she also gives recitals, exhibitions and concerts. She has been writing about art and literature for newspapers and magazines since 1988. She has published a dozen books of poetry, the most recent, Desintegrar-se awarded the Cadaqués to Rosa Leveroni prize in 2018. She directed the Setmana de Poesia de Barcelona (2005-2011) and Poesia als parcs, a poetry cycle set in the nature parks belonging to Barcelona (2007-2014). At present she is making videos interviewing Catalan authors for the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (ILC), directing a cycle of conversations entitled Art entre lletres at the Joan Brossa Foundation and La Pahissa del Marquet – Arts-Lletres-Natura for Barcelona Provincial Deputation at the Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac Nature Park.
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user3412517
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/esterxargay/videos
Ester Xargay: http://www.fluxfestival.org/08/projeccions/esterxargay/article.htm
Mercè Capdevila i Gaya. Barcelona, 1946. Studied music at the Conservatorio Superior Municipal de Barcelona, while at the same time coursing fine arts at the Escuela Massana de Barcelona and Kunsthand Werk Schule in Pforzheim (Germany). She worked on electro-acoustic music at Phonos (Barcelona) with Gabriel Brncic and completed composition courses under Luigi Nono, Josep M. Mestres Quadreny, Corian Aharionan, Lluís Callejo, Carmelo Bernaola and Luis de Pablo. Her works have been performed in music centres in Europe, Canada and the US. She has created commissioned work for CDMC of Spain’s Ministry of Culture and the Catalan Composers Association. During the 1993-94 season, whe worked in Aaron Copland’s studio at New York University as guest composer. Her works have been recorded by Spanish National Radio, Catalunya Música and Radio France, on two solo cd’s and on numerous compilation cd’s.
Miquel Àngel Marín. La Cava-Deltebre, 1966. Clarinetist and poet who trained in Catalonia and Germany. He performs classical repertoire (as soloist, orchestra and chamber musician) as well as free improvisation and action music. A musician for indoors and out, he is as comfortable playing theatres and auditoriums as on the street and unusual locations. He is part of the Catalan Chamber Music Orchestra and the Free’t Collective, among others. He has published two books: Lo clarinet és l’aixada and Música és enxampar mosques.
Licantropia
2004_5:47 min
Direction and text: Ester Xargay
Music: Mercè Capdevila
Thanks to Adolf Alcañiz
Videopoem. Music, image and text feed off each other. A paranoia of languages that unfold, superimpose on and complement each other in an apparent narrative about…
Sostres
2007_13 min
Direction: Ester Xargay
Music: Mercè Capdevila
Thanks to Adolf Alcañiz
Videoinstallation presented at the Fem Art competition, Francesca Bonnemaison Centre.
Zenithal screening featuring a series of ceilings, travelling through the different storeys of a building. The music accentuates the camera’s course, as it appears to filter through ceilings, walls and windows. The music adds an isolating element to the images, providing a subtly unnerving intimacy.
Pigallat
2013_12:50 min
Direction: Ester Xargay
Music: Mercè Capdevila
Thanks to Adolf Alcañiz
Piece for electro-acoustics and video presented at the Granollers Museum and also for the Synchresis III programme in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
And the music becomes light and darkness in a universe dotted with rhythms and moving spots that cover different registers of expression, showing the similarities, play, and complicity of construction, destruction and manipulation that sound and visual work entail.
Clar i net
2014_10 min
Direction: Ester Xargay
Music: Mercè Capdevila
Thanks to Adolf Alcañiz
Video created for the Montañas concert by Mercè Capdevila (composer) and Luis Fernández Castelló (clarinet), under the umbrella of the XXI Festival Punto de Encuentro organised by the AMEE, the Spanish Association of Electro-acoustic Music, at the Auditorium in the Conservatorio Superior de Música Joaquín Rodrigo, Valencia.
A musical mountain range of textual movements in cliffs of images. The poetics of an avalanche of sounds that brings about a visual landslide.
Sorra de temps absent
2021_15 min
Author: Ester Xargay
Direction: Ester Xargay and Adolf Alcañiz
Inscriptions on Carrara marble: Marta Darder
Camera: Adolf Alcañiz
Music: Mercè Capdevila
Voiceover: Ester Xargay
Thanks to: Adolf Alcañiz, Lluís Cera, Fundació Felícia Fuster and Àngels Vivas.
This piece is part of a video installation shown at Arts Santa Mònica for the Plurivisions exhibition running to the end of May 2021 to celebrate the poet and painter Felícia Fuster’s centenary.
A dreamlike journey there and back through the work of Felícia Fuster. Images that make up a series of compositions that play with visual, poetic and biographic aspects of the artist. A selection of works from the rotating series Plurivisions, photographs and handwriting belonging to the author, travel over images of a marble slab on which the hands of Marta Darder engrave the word “sorra” (sand). The action of engraving reminds us of an hourglass where the flow of sand marks the passing of time. Sorra de temps absent is the title of Felícia Fuster’s anthology containing the poem El verb el vent, voiced in the video.
Microdanses
2012_6:54 min
Direction and soundscape: Ester Xargay
Idea, text, music and performance: Miquel Àngel Marín
Editing and 3D animation: Adolf Alcañiz
In Microdanses, musician Miquel Àngel Marín demonstrates the language of gesture generated by the music he plays on his clarinet, specifically devised to make the keys and other parts of the instrument dance. At the same time, a selection of sentences from his book Música és enxampar mosques also dance, flowing as soundwaves over the images. These unusual performances, played and danced, create a sort of choreography of Brossian entrances and exits.
FLUX CLUB celebrates its 12th season at the Antic Teatre and the 21st anniversary of its creation in 2000.
This is a fortnightly video programme that reflects the vitality of video creation in Barcelona. It hosts all kinds of sessions with screenings, video performances, and debates offering direct contact between audiences and video creators. The sessions focus on a range of subjects, from monographics of well-known directors to specific themes such as video dance and video poetry, or collective sessions dedicated to emerging authors.
The programme is open to everything currently going on in the field of video in Barcelona, complementing the FLUX Video Auteur Festival with its content and extending its sphere of influence beyond the dates of the festival, which takes place in December.
HABITUAL VIDEO TEAM is a non-profit association that has as its main objective the promotion of activities related to the visual arts, specifically, video art: www.habitualvideoteam.org.
A fundamental area of their work is the organisation of festivals, cycles and video shows, such as the FLUX Video Auteur Festival: www.fluxfestival.org, and the INFLUX Audiovisual Performing Arts Festival: www.influxfestival.org.
Another area of Habitual Video Team’s activity is video documentation of cultural events mainly related to experimental music and poetry performances. In 2012 they launched the SUMMA project in order to convert this audiovisual heritage (more than 1000 recordings) into a non-profit online video archive: www.summa-hvt.org.
