This portfolio is intended to be a walkthrough of my work in relation to my proposal.
This is a straight-up lecture giving an introductory overview of whiteness and Brazilian music from colonial times to this day.
B. Writting - "Music, Whiteness and Experimentalism: critical perspectives" (in portuguese) - 2022
Abstract
This paper approaches the perpetuation of epistemic racism in the musical field, from the colonial period to the contemporary contexts. By looking at universalizing assumptions linked to the focus on the materiality of sound,
apart from socio-political, contextual implications, tensions and incompatibilities between musical experimentalism and political activism are delineated. Finally, the article points out recent initiatives of decolonial potential in the experimental context.
C. Writting - "Institutional Critique and the Lecture-Performance" (in english) - 2018
This is a writing piece where I elaborate an understanding of Lecture-Performance which informs my work.
Link to the Article (in english)D. Album - English to Portuguese Lessons - 2017
I produced this album when coming back to Brazil after four years of living in the U.S.
It's a series of sound collages dwelling with identity, around translations of basic English phrases like "Who are you?" that acquire an existential tone:
The album has four "chapters"/tracks.
From this Album, I think the first track "Presenting Yourself" is the most representative/relevant for this application.
Each performance of the failed pianist is different, below there are a couple of teasers.
This is the footage of one of the first versions of the Failed Pianist, still in 2018, in Brazil.
"Skip Ad" was a commission from the Tectonics Festival (BBC Scotland/Glasgow).
It is not directly related to the Failed Pianist but I included it here because it is a failed pianist inversion, where the pianist is pictured as an entrepreneur.
It also relates to the topic of whiteness in a way.
The work utilizes the transcription of advertisements on financial investments and career advice that were frequently popping up on my feed during pandemic times.
Skip Ad portrays the emptiness and pervasiveness of neoliberal discourses.
This is a collaboration between me and the cinematographer Polina Georgescu in making a short film on The Failed Pianist.
The shooting took place at the Artist Residency Civitella Ranieri (IT).
I will post below some recent experiences that involve the use of audio processing with supercollider.
The Swiss Piano Quartet KUKURUZ commissioned and recorded From Memory in their latest album.
For this piece, I wrote each pianist a letter to be opened and read during the recording session at the studio. In the letter, I ask them to play or even practice some excerpts of pieces that were somehow emblematic of their formative years with the piano.
This becomes the source material for a collage piece, where I process these fragments, creating multiple sonic layers of this collection of memories, intertwining the processed sounds with the unaltered recordings.
This album (released on Vinyl by Black Truffle) utilizes recordings I did in the Schloss Chappel during my short visit as a guest.
I combined the organ and whistles with my first experiments in supercollider.
The recording below is an example of this "detuned piano" I am trying to develop (it is not yet released)
This was a 10-day long performance piece where I lived with a piano for ten days executing a score which is a mixture of life schores and musical patterns. As part of the piece I built the cube myself, and in this sense, it can be seen as an installation as well. I've started to work a lot with the color red (and its multiple meanings). It happened on the top of a mountain and was awarded by the City of North Hollywood happening also in the city center. This piece has to do with the time I spent in California doing my doctorate at CalArts. Today I don't relate so much with the "Philip-Glass-like" music I was doing while in the Cube, but I have good memories of the performance, and the weird encounters I had with it.
This is a week-long performance where I live in a commercial space (lobby or store), playing loung-like music on the piano while broadcasting voice messages sent by the audience contacted through hookup apps. This work investigates the connection between notions of romantic love and commerce, by inquiring participants to answer questions on their notions/opitnions on relationships from an online profiles that states:
I am a pianist, looking for someone to perform for,
in exchange for your audio about relationships
which I will broadcast during the performance.
This installation works with the multiple and sometimes opposite meanings of red: red of love, red of rage, red of communism, red of extreme right, and so on. This was an attempt to exercise the connection between sound and its context through those meanings. The Red Cube is an installation consisting of a quadriphonic sound system setup, projection mapping and red light bulbs. For seven days, 24 hours a day, the installation shapes the space in different configurations of red to allude to a specific symbology at every hour.