2007
Collaborative performance with grand piano, ten television monitors, ten unsynchronised dvd players, neon lights, 40 minutes.
Exh.: performed on 22 August as part of the exhibition Odradek, also including Elaine Miles & Eugene Ughetti, Michael Graeve, Solver (John Nixon & Marco Fusinato), Domenico de Clario & Eugene Carchesio, Lily Hibberd, and Eiichi Tosaki & Steve Adam, 15-31 August.
casa amarilla was the first part of a serial collaborative work by Domenico de Clario and Tom Nicholson. The collaboration originates in Chile, and specifically in two independently-undertaken works which took place on the same day in Chile in October 2006. On 7 October, de Clario performed his Sound translation of Pablo Neruda's el libro de las preguntas / what kind of pianist are you? at La Sebastiana, the house Pablo Neruda inhabited in Valparaiso until his death shortly after the military coup in 1973. The score for the performance was a systematic translation of Neruda’s late poems El Libro de las Preguntas into musical notation, and de Clario performed this score on a piano in the garden of La Sebastiana, overlooking the Pacific. On the same day, Nicholson’s video El Siglo was broadcast on Señal 3 de la Victoria, an autonomous quasi-legal television station run by the community of La Victoria, a community originally squatted in the 1950s on the outskirts of Santiago. El Siglo was based on a list of instances of the creation of national boundaries, a list which Nicholson has been compiling since late 2003. This list was translated into Spanish and read by Gloria Rodriguez, a life-long resident of La Victoria and President of its self-governing council. The reading was undertaken continuously in the studios of Señal 3 over 100 minutes, and became the work broadcast on Señal 3 on the evening of 7 October.
casa amarilla evolved through the relationship between these two works. It re-formulates Gloria Rodriguez’s reading, multiplying her voice through 10 un-synchronised domestic television monitors into a field of sound. De Clario transplants his system of musical translation from El Libro de las Preguntas on to the list of instances of the creation of national boundaries. The collaboration evolved as a way to set different processes of translation into relation with one another. These processes become systems of abstraction, but also systems in which the body returns, above all through the production of sound and its accumulations. Just as the list was first conceived by Nicholson as a meditation on mnemonics and drawing – through a shared constituent element, the line – the collaboration has become a meditation on mnemonics and sound. As a collaborative process, the work is also another way to mine Neruda’s last poems and their formulation as “questions”, but also their cryptic relationship to the imminence of death and their situation of political upheaval.
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Nicholson's list of instances of the creation of national boundaries has also been the basis of a 13-metre pencil wall drawing, produced over two weeks at Ocular Lab in 2005; El Siglo, a 100 minute video-work which was broadcast on Señal 3 de la Victoria in Santiago on 5 and 6 October 2006; and a collaborative score with the NY-based composer Andrew Byrne, a work performed in September 2006. The list was originally created as a mapping device for banner marching routes, part of the project Marches for another season.
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