Friday: “Free your mind… and your ass will follow”
There was something different in the air of Odemira after the Thursday afternoon dialogues and the enormous amount of sonic energy liberated by Handsworth Songs. It felt like a turning point in the program, and the rest of the day would prove it. Early in the morning, instead of discussing or watching films, we gathered at Banda Filarmónica for a listening session. The first performance was Atmospheric Rivers (2024), by Ernst Karel, a work of live quadraphonic audio. While we listened to multichannel recordings of giant masses of floating water, resonating in the walls of the room and transporting us to distant whereabouts, I could witness a drastic change. Now, instead of the often tense atmosphere of public debate, people were sitting on the floor, lying down, often with eyes closed. Muscles were being stretched, as well as our minds.
Before performing her work of live stereo audio, Vanishing Points (2023–2024), guest sound artist Matilde Meirelles approached the windows of the room and asked that they remain open during the session. As we listened to a beautiful, layered composition of semi-rural sounds and urban roar, from London tube lines to a quiet path surrounded by trees, the air flowed in, carrying the scarce noises of Odemira. For the past few days, as we entered that space, we would bypass the Social Security agency located in the same building, always busy with a long line of migrant workers speaking languages unknown to me. They seemed alienated from what was happening next door, as I was disaffected by their presence while engaging in the seminar activities. For the first time, that room sounded less isolated from the outside. We would still not share the same space, but now we could at least breathe the same air.
The air of Odemira would make another special appearance in the afternoon, during the screening of The Tuba Thieves (2023), by guest artist Alison O’Daniel. Based on her experiences of being d/Deaf, the filmmaker proposed a different listening disposition: each of us was invited to inflate a balloon and hold it during the projection, so we could feel the sound through vibrations crossing our body, as people on the d/Deaf spectrum do.
The spectrum of cinematic forms of The Tuba Thieves is extremely large and varied, and it has been discussed before in Documentary. Loosely based on a news story of teenage thefts of instruments belonging to high school orchestras around Los Angeles, the film is a patchwork of speculative fiction, experimental ruptures on the relationship between image, sound, and text, perfectly rhythmed gags, and countless other gestures. The playfulness of the captioning work is particularly amazing. At some point, every caption feels like either a joke (“quiet air”), a poem (“vulnerable melody”), or both, constantly breaking our expectations about what it means to describe a sound.
Did you ever wonder what happened to a classical music listener who walked out of the premiere of John Cage’s 4′33″ in 1952? In O’Daniel’s film, irritated by Cage’s refusal to play the piano, he goes to the nearby woods, takes off his shoes, and steps on the grass. Or, as prefer to think, deeply affected by the musical liberation of the sounds of the world by Cage, he wants more, and that’s why he leaves his seat in the auditorium and exits to the forest: to be able to experience noises with his whole body, and not just his ears. Just as we were doing with our toys made of latex and air.
Before leaving the movie theater, I could witness the impetus liberated by The Tuba Thieves. The balloons were floating through the room’s atmosphere, thrown by the remaining listeners during the credits. I won’t forget those childish noises penetrating the quiet air of a movie theater. The day before, in the conversation with Mathison and Stewart, curator Debuysere wondered about the generative capacities of sound. Those balloons were the living image of what sound can activate.
Exiting the cinema, we were invited to walk a little bit and go to a quiet, autumnal park for coffee. The effects of the change in the soundscape continued to appear. A group started doing yoga in a small circle. By the time we went back for the discussion, the circle was getting bigger and bigger.
The conversation with O’Daniel was revealing, especially when she shared some life experiences that informed the construction of The Tuba Thieves. “The fragmentary structure of the film is how I experience the world,” she said, implying that she is always listening through dispersed bits of sonic and visual information. “I’m always in the zone of compensation,” she added. And so are we, experiencing the lacunary form of The Tuba Thieves.
During the conversation, I remembered a time when I had a blind student in a film criticism workshop, and when I expressed my concerns about my inability to deal with his experience of the films, eager to translate as best as I could, he answered: “Don’t worry. I see films differently from everyone else. But don’t we all?”
Friday would definitely be a refreshing day. The culmination of that process would happen after dinner, during an informal encounter at a bar in Odemira. A bunch of participants, especially the Latin Americans, were eager to dance, but the quiet, musicless soundscape wasn’t helping. Suddenly, someone spotted a boombox nearby, someone else went to talk to the friendly locals, and in a flash, there was a hand passing asking for coins, so we could chip in and rent the portable sound system for a while to play some reggaeton. Out of the blue, a wheelbarrow materialized itself, we put the boombox inside it for better acoustics, and the night finally sounded like a party. Excited by what was happening, I suggested we should temporarily rename the town “Odescuta”, a wordplay with ode, mira (to see) and escuta (to listen). The improvised party lasted a few minutes, enough to free our asses for a while, as the title of a famous Funkadelic album would say. When the battery died, technology seemed to play against our sonic desires. But this was no problem for us, experts in gambiarra1. It would only take four people, four cellphones trying to play the same music at the exact same time, to create our own version of quadraphonic sound. “Ways of listening” never sounded so accurate to describe what we were experiencing.