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duration: 50'
date of completion: June 2018 instrumentation: speaking cellist, speaking pianist, four percussionists and video projection awards: Chagrin Awards by Sound and Music. There are myriad ways to cause terror and so, plenty different forms of terrorism. There is terrorism that cares for the technical quality of its own performance and is especially zealous in all which concerns aesthetical production. In the end of the day – and this applies to any case that there may be – there is always a message to be send across, through spectacular acts, in a quest for the widest possible audience.
There is that kind of terrorism, which invariably jumps out of the niche and, just like a limelight-drunk moth, has visions of becoming a pop start. There is terrorism that worries about authorship and lays a signature on anything reachable, from scribbles to magna opera, since it even shows a petty interest for archiving, and scrupulously crafts its own biography, glimpsing at the remote possibility of one day coming see it published inside a leather cover. There is a tiny drop of terror in arousing the ism that lives in us, that very flame, which devours our insides before any intolerable injustice, shakes our agreeable stance, and washes from our minds any kind of decency. There burns our blood and through our head, a toast to nihilism is summoned in the most Russian way conceivable. |
SISTEMA, July 2018
performed by the New Maker Ensemble @ Fórum Machico, CC John dos Passos and Baltazar Dias Theatre |
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duration: indeterminate
date of completion: January 2015 instrumentation: cello, piano, clarinet, percussion, six game players, one narrator One cellist, three species, one narrator, five types, one clarinettist, two villagers, three intensions, one pianist, one hunter, ten moments, one singer, two modes, one witch, six or five turns, one village, one forest, two wolves, two factions, four stages, lots of screams, death, two statuses, too many lies, conspiracy, two times, irritation, tension, stress... hyperstress! HYPERSTRESS!!!
SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE
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in Occupy Goldsmiths 2015, March 2015
performed by the New Maker Ensemble @ Deptford Town Hall - Council Chamber |
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duration: repeatable in game-performances
of 5 to 15 minutes each date of completion: May 2015 instrumentation: oboe, tenor saxophone, violin and cello; 3 game players and 1 narrator After some minutes, trying to pitilessly ignore the elephant in the room, the natural inclination for survival spoke louder than any possible decency: “WE HAVE 5 MINUTES TO KNOW WHERE’S THE FUCKING BOMB!!!” [but then, civility was in fact deeply ingrained in the these people’s culture] “...or else, you know... all these people die...”.
Game Mechanics: Each PLAYER knows his or her own identity... but not the identities of the other two PLAYERS!
Every PLAYER is allowed to say everything they wish in any manner or style they assume, for there are no scripted speech lines or rules in terms of the communication the 3 PLAYERS can emergently develop between themselves. Only THE BOMB HOLDER, in order to achieve his or her aim, should absolutely not say he or she holds the bomb! THE BOMB HOLDER should act in dissimulated ways; also pretending he or she is looking desperately for the bomb. SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE
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duration: 15'
date of completion: October 2016 instrumentation: cello, viola, tenor and alto We are both standing in a room, looking at the walls and stuff. Someone comes in and shouts “SOLO!!!” and stays there like a prick. I mean, like a statue. Not so much in shock, we are nevertheless intrigued by this strange event. I look at you [fast and precise, with a slightly angry face] and, in response; you look back at me [slower, with a calmly elevated left eye brow]. We both nod affirmatively. Once, twice, three times [we should have stopped here] four times, five, six, seven, eight, nine [this is totally going too far] ten times... We believe there is complicity in our understanding of what “SOLO!!!” means, but in every nod lives a different thought about good company.
This is a collection of 29120 short pieces where the relationships between of solo and accompaniment are tested. It most likely will never happen that all the pieces become composed, or if started, ever finished. Nevertheless the collection should grow considerably over time.
Every new piece must be composed for an ensemble with at least two performers, where one acts as the soloist, and the other, as the accompanist. There is no maximum number of people to be accompanists but the soloist can only be one per piece. |
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duration: 45' (original) or 10' (adaptation)
date of completion: May 2013 / June 2013 instrumentation: six talking instrumentalists (original) solo speaking violist/cellist (adaptation) British Composer Awards 2013 FDA AND THE PURENESS OF FOOD,
HYSTERICALLY COLOURFUL CANDY BRANDS, SELF DISINTEGRATION, A NEVER ENDING JOKE ABOUT A SWEDISH GUY, A REHEARSAL OF A NON-EXISTENT PIECE... ALL IN ONE PACKAGE! American candy brands are the main issue in this work. Other subtopics are specifically: food colourings, health and lifestyles, and a nonsense joke about a Swedish guy, which never gets told.
"In the commercial universe, everything that is played is spoken and everything that is spoken is played". This is the universe where, at their time, each performer delivers without rest a torrent of information which I originally found written on american candy packages. "In the conversational universe, performers talk amongst themselves about some uninteresting stuff". We could say, that here and there, the characters are adducted and used by the commercial universe, then sent back, without the slightest trace of memory about having done so, to the conversational one. This product should be consumed as part of a healthy balanced lifestyle
Original red twists, always fat free! Express your peepsonality! |
in NEW MUSIC DAY, June 2014
performed by Rodrigo B. Camacho, Milena Mateus, Marat Ingeldeev, Roxanna Albayati, Sara Rodrigues and Memii Mudmee @ Deptford Town Hall in DISINTEGRATION, December 2017
performed by the New Maker Ensemble @ Reading Room, Wellcome Collection |
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theatre/dance piece
music direction in collaboration with Mónica Calle 15 to 20 actresses without any formal training in music date of start: 2014 date of completion: 2021 Resistance. Courage. Transcendence. A group of women stands before a colossal task: to submit themselves to the hardest challenges, over the period of 7 years, in pursuit of relentless self-improvement, enlightenment and total realisation.
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lecture performance
in collaboration with Sara Rodrigues November 2020 duration 15' instrumentation: table, laptops, projection, suits and food The text was entirely composed of transcriptions taken from interviews, debates and reports from the television show 'Earth and Men': "The earth market is a market that is not working in Portugal, precisely because there are connections to the earth that are not exclusively economic".
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(Edited excerpt by Sara Rodrigues)
@ Auditório da CCOP in CABARÉ BRUTAL 2020, Porto |
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duration: 35'
date of completion: April 2016 instrumentation: six speaking percussionists based on the poem "Escrevo porque há ameaças que são missões" by Dinarte Vasconcelos The house becomes a body. It has a centre, an untouchable essence. It turns itself inwards, being interiorly, or outwards, saying what there is to be said, to itself, and to the other. There is waking up every day in hysterical tension, there is returning in a densely liquified state, there is hitting the walls to the west and remaining behaved between the symbolically violent limits of the quotidian.
This is the violence of being part of a place, which parts thinking from doing with such strength, that only through screeches one understands the word in a cold-cut fashion. |
PLACE | TRATUÁRIO, April 2016
@ 50 Rua Nova de São Pedro, Funchal, Portugal |
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Durational Performance | Sound installation
duration: 4 hours date of completion: October 2018 / ongoing in collaboration with Sara Rodrigues originally commissioned by SISMÓGRAFO for Não é ainda o mar, curated by Óscar Faria Two human figures collect samples from living species. They do so equipped with protective suits, gloves, gas masks, dissection kits, water droplets and glass frames. As the performance ends, there remains a collection of around two hundred squares, keeping a dead memory a world in rapid transformation.
Music: Missa pro Defunctis (1639) by Duarte Lobo.
On an extremely stretched temporal structure, the original words from the latin mass have been substituted by the scientific names all extinct species so far. The female voice (Sara) sings the emergence of those species, whilst the male voice (Rodrigo) sings their extinction. |
in GAIA TODO UM MUNDO, October 2018 @ Corpus Christi, Porto
in ART NIGHT (2019) @ Chalton Gallery, London in ILHÉSTICO (2019), curated by Miguel Von Hafe Perez, @ Porta 33, Funchal in DEPICTION OF LIVING, January 2020 @ Ecology Pavilion, London |
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Performative installation | Workshop
duration: 30' to 45' date of completion: May 2018 material: a number of people divided in at least 2 groups, beating £1 coins against a hard surface (building's glass) after specific temporal, rhythmical and metric structures originally made the UK University Pension Cuts Strike Humans perform considerably poorly at tacitly understanding large numbers. Beyond a certain point, quantities tend to lose autonomous meaning and our ability to visualise them just astonishingly fails.
From money values above the millions, distances wider than the light-year, to populations of a country, or the amounts of cells we have in our body, to the concept of the planet's weight, or the time scale of its geological history... We really do suck at this! |
Strike performance @ UCU (2018)
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date of completion: 2017 - ongoing
sonic material: recordings of musician's interpretations visual material: pre-compositional sketches of mine collected since 2012; 16 hanging loudspeakers I have always believed in the methodological (and even therapeutic) benefits of throwing away everything possible. On the other hand, my work evolves ever more complex, and so, the ever longer and denser pre-compositional processes start to amass. So, and due to a major influence from my father, who is an antrhopomusicologist, today I have archived nearly a thousand documental fragments, including notation studies, instrumentation lists, scripts, scenic plans, drafts, graphs, tables, diagrams, maps, matrices, syntactic systems, functions and calculations, translation and sonification schemes etc.
TAXONOMIA interacts with local artistic communities, with whom I share the collection, so that issues to do with the functions of signs and symbols in human communication are explored. Concepts such as notation, interpretation and improvisation are approached, whilst realisation, concretisation, materialisation, sonification and translation processes are tested. Additionally, there is space reserved for discussion and negotiation of notions of necessity, utility, efficiency and intelligibility. In regards to the physical installation of the work, initially, the space starts empty and blank. Day after day, the walls become gradually filled up with drawings. One by one, and mediated by a conversation, these are interpreted and recorded by local musicians. The recordings are edited in-situ and positioned with multiple loudspeakers in accordance to each respective drawing. The piece’s shape thenceforth advances organically through the walls, gradually filling the room with the memory of everybody’s participation. |
presented along The Stage of Things by Sara Rodrigues
project: TAXONOMIA O ESTADO DAS COISAS @ PIPINOIR, Funchal 2017 @ Galeria do Sol, Porto 2018 supported by the Funchal City Hall, Regional Culture Bureau and the Gulbenkian Foundation |
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date of completion: september 2016
materials: 8mx36mm natural hemp rope, red and blue food dye, 28cmx13cm printed mate paper in glass frames, 10cmx10cm glass cubic or cylindrical expositor "Adding food dye to victorian sociology and roping time and distance at a ratio of one to one thousand"
I interviewed two old ladies in Deptford. One of boarded the MV Empire Windrush in the 60s and traveled 7500km from Kingston, Jamaica, to Deptford, London, UK. She responded, as many others did, to the British call for work force to be employed in rebuilding the country. Around the same time, the other old lady, had to be evicted from her house in Deptford, for it was being demolished, along with many others, in rows, in order to make up space for the newest modern high rise flats. She moved into a flat in Woolwich, 7.5km away from her birthplace. |
The LivingRoom Act IV: Canning Time, September, 2016
Art Licks 2016 @ El Cheap’Ou discount store in 75 Deptford High Street |
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participative audiovisual installation
visual material: metal structure on wheels, rigged punch bag, electronic sensors, wooden platform with Laptop, sound interface, microcontroller, automated receipt printer. post-performance receipts, video and audio cables stereo PA system, LED/LCD screen with/or wide projection performative and sonic material: people hitting the punching bag (generally with natural sub-utterances) Recorded readings of critical texts (through stereo PA system) Conversations and discussions between participants and the artist duration: unlimited cycles of 5 to 10 minutes date of completion: 2018/2019 on going An old impairing and dawdling blindness
leaves us to the ever lasting stunning rams and so consistently there lays yeaned such tormenting yet familiar apathy. So I despise warm baths and along, the daily cult of anaesthetics, the pastoral venoms of petty dreams, the insoluble drowsiness, unceasingly sailing an all too sweet misery of serums When someone says that they have a problem, you imagine perhaps that they are stuck with a complicated situation, that something is tricky, sticky, or even 'funny'. We feel as though life stops before a problem, as things get entangled and cease to work. It is a blockage, a barrier, an insurmountable impossibility!
However, the idea of a problem is actually based on an action and, in fact, a quite physical one. The Greek verb probállō is composed by pro (forwards) and bállō (to throw). So, in PROBLEM, Rodrigo challenges you to rescue the proactive nature of what problems should be. Throw some punches at your own problems! In this interactive audiovisual installation, name any problem you may have. While you are being handed a pair of gloves, your problem materialises on a wall projection, and there it will lie, patiently waiting for anything you wish to do to it. Get ready for the five-minutes chance you're given with the punching bag. You are going to address that problem face to face and, who knows, the live wavy graph that your performance generates might even render illegible the words your problem is written with. In the end, after a short conversation about how it went, you will take home a signed receipt with your name, your score and the date, proving that you have actually confronted that problem. Problem is a call to action, and a reminder, for we often forget we have a body; one that is simultaneously physical, biological, animal, social, cultural, political… Rodrigo sees this work as a poetic exploration of the physical-intellectual dichotomy and attempts to reconcile our multidimensional selves. From the smallest to the biggest, from the simplest to the most complex, abstract or unfathomable, every problem is welcome to be thrown forwards, towards a sense of unity. |
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Audiovisual Installation
In collaboration with Sara Rodrigues 2020 Physical Materials: Soil (Frechas, Trás-os-Montes) with wheat flour glue and water, on cardboard with velcro. Wall - Graphic score painted with brown earth pigment (Frechas) with guar gum, water, clove oil and honey. Ceiling - twigs of Holly Oak tree, Broom, Olive tree, Wild Rose, Bramble and Gnidium; with variable lengths, hanging from a jute and hemp thread. Video (30'): physical works in jute outfits (Frechas). Sound (30') 4 channels: 6 voice sound piece; reading of the graphic score with excerpts from the 90's portuguese television show “Earth and Men“ (“A Terra e os Homens”). Model - maquette of a 2.5 hectare piece of land (Frechas): flour glue with water, guar gum; with a red pigment outline of Sismógrafo's floor plan, to a scale of 100:1. Bottles - an edition of 10 Wild Rose syrup ‘Terra Quente’ (Frechas). Books - available for consultation during the exhibition period. In your opinion, has the Portuguese agriculture lost, or won? I think that these questions cannot be put in such simplistic terms. The Portuguese agroindustrial sector was practically an inexistent sector, especially in comparison with Europe. When I arrived in Portugal, I felt the shock of that backwardness; a backwardness that was technological, economic, social, cultural. Before joining the EU, in 1986, we didn’t have any proper structures for the slaughter of cattle. We didn’t have what we call an ‘agri-food industry’. Extremely outdated methods of production with low productivity levels. We are coming to a time, in which we will be forced or bound to alter many of our traditional habits and behaviours in agriculture. Most Portuguese farmers maintain social representations, which lead them to remain attached to the earth in ways that are, sometimes, not very rational. (...)
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@ SISMÓGRAFO, Porto 2020
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type: video essay
duration: 43'58'' date of completion: March 2017 materials: kitchen, broken fluorescent lamp, interior plants, chairs and various clothing pieces. text improvised live by the author Created as a response to questions to do with cultural exportation, proposed to me as the main issue in the documentary FÁÇA-SE LUZ! by Paula Cristina Vieira and Nuno Filipe (Mr End)
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@Pipinoir, August 2017
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type: sonic art piece
duration: 14’38’’ date of completion: May, 2014 material: field recordings of the "Borracheiros" from Porto da Cruz, Madeira Island, Portugal and field recordings from the uprisings in Lisbon 2011 Soundtrack for the performance CEGOS by Marco Bulhões and Marcelo Denny from Desvio Coletivo (São Paulo, Brazil), developed in collaboration with Dançando com a Diferença.
It most surely takes us unarmed, when a deep repugnance arises for the love we have for the things we more and more come to know better. It is always the most disarming, finding the other side. So hurtful for the caressing world we thought we knew not to be there anymore, or to be broken. When it stops gifting us with its safe delicacies.
Today it is not certain that the bloodless revolution on 25th of April of 1974 had very long lasting positive repercussions to be felt in out times. Portugal is, as many other European satellites, again under the oppression of other new and possibly stronger economical dictators. The future is unclear and not very promising. I then leave you with the following: “To what extent has the declaration of independence of the United States of America been not toasted to the taste of blood from Porto da Cruz?” |
Pure Gold Festival, May 2015
@ South Bank Centre BLIND PLURAL, 2016 @ Hundred Years Gallery |
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type: sonic art piece
duration: 4'51'' date of completion: August 2015 material: snitched recording of the live broadcast of the British Composer Awards 2013, on Hear and Now, BBC Radio 3, including bits of the premiere of AMERICAN CANDY - WHAT THE HELL IS YELLOW NO. 6?!? by Sarah-Jane Bradley on that same event when a situation sucks so much
that you just want everything to explode... |
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type: lecture performance (live recorded)
duration: 20' date of completion: 30th January 2020 material: audiovisual presentation with text, images and sounds, both recorded and live themes: culture, politics, justice, ecology
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@ Teatro Municipal Baltazar Dias, in Pontes e Caminhos da Música Contemporânea, Jan 2020
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