I visited Amparo, a neighbor from the village. My dad calls her “cousin Amparo”, though I think she’s not part of the blood family. It doesn’t matter, though, whether she is or not. In a village like this, anyone could be “cousin x”. Amparo handcrafted my traditional garment for the Holy Week when I was around 13 or 14 years old. The materials for this dress are usually very expensive, and so it is a once-in-a-lifetime task for a village tailor to make one. She’s retired, but she still masters the sewing machine. “Hands are not what they used to be”, she often commented.
Amparo’s hands at her home in Huércal-Overa, Spain, and sounds from the sewing machine. Photo by Juan Miralles. August 4, 2025
Baldomero said he didn’t mold with the potter’s wheel during the summer, only in the winter. And so, the work at his workshop is cyclical over the course of a year. Her employee was painting clay jugs. Contrary to what Loli does, they use other colors and techniques apart from the traditional ones because this prevents the business from getting stuck. He felt sorry about the gradual disappearance of people handcrafting with clay in the village, even though it was thanks to this tradition that the village had become historically relevant.
The shop was sort of new. Everything was handcrafted, yet nothing was evidently related to the crafting traditions of the village. It was just the little personal workshop of Sandra, who worked making figurines with clay, miniatures, fabric dolls, and all kinds of trinkets and objects that she then sold. She said she was often commissioned to create special pieces on demand.
Video component at Organo Hall, during the setup of Esparto, embodied. Photo by Pilar Miralles. October 17, 2025
Stories from other hands
During my field trip to Southeastern Spain in August 2025, I visited hands other than Paco’s. The documentation of these encounters, even if it won’t be part of any of the installations of the series, allowed me to understand a bit better why I wanted to temporarily focus on touch. These are some of the traces from these encounters:
Everyone knows Loli in this village. The TV has been at her workshop many times, and tourists often come to visit. Loli has been painting on clay since she can remember. She told me about the pigments she used for painting, where they are collected in the nearby lands, and then she described the traditional patterns and techniques for painting. She often invites people to join her and try painting something. I did that myself, but the paint kept dripping off against my will. Loli complained that her son didn’t seem to like molding clay that much.
Rafaela’s hands at the jarapas shop in Níjar, Spain, and sounds from the looming machine. Photo by Juan Miralles. August 18, 2025
Queti’s hands at her farmhouse in El Saltador, Spain, and sounds from the bread kneading. Photo by Juan Miralles. August 4, 2025
Video component
I went to visit Paco[2] again in August at his workshop in Níjar (Almería, Spain). We met two times. During the first of these encounters, he crafted a miniature esparto shoe (called esparteña) in front of me and allowed me to document the process. He also taught me some basic notions, such as how to craft an esparto thread and how to craft a three-strand esparto braid. During the second encounter, he taught me how to craft a five-strand esparto braid and how to sew it. I documented this second gathering again. One of my original aims when visiting Paco was to record a long video of just him braiding esparto grass, apart from the teaching. This situation never happened: I never got to tell him, “just craft for the camera as you do every day”, because he doesn’t craft for a camera every day, and because, when he does, the camera has already created a distance from his craft and from the people bringing the camera. I wasn’t able to overcome that distance. I had already created some distance when recording the teaching, as using the camera then meant, “I want to learn but, this is also because of something else”. And then, you need to explain that something else, which is your research. And you need to get consent for the use of his image, sound, words. And the research is something that doesn’t take part in the social relationship you promised him to bear: “I’m Pilar, the granddaughter of Juan José. He was a neighbor of the village; do you remember him? And you probably know my dad: he was a priest here in the early 90s”. And so, the research is already a distance. Yet you ought to be transparent. Paco tacitly trusted me to care about esparto grass beyond a university project, and so, my relationship with Paco would need a reason to exist beyond the research, or even despite it.
Nonetheless, Paco welcomed me, and it seemed that he didn’t mind the camera much. And he taught me how to braid and sew esparto “the way [he] did it”, insisting on the fact that there are many ways, and that I should end up doing it “as I please”. The documentation of this teaching was what I ended up using as the material for the video component of Esparto, embodied. I originally envisioned a video of Paco braiding esparto, without cuts and without me. It ended up being a very unaesthetic collection of snippets of Paco teaching me how to braid esparto, and my hands appeared there too. Even without faces, and without sound coming from the video, the communication between us is evident through the hands, through how they move. But everyone who learns some crafting has to learn it from someone, whether it is our grandpa or some unknown hands on a video tutorial on the internet. At the installation, Paco was meant to accompany us while crafting: the video wasn’t meant to be contemplated as an independent element making sense on its own. The projection was bigger than I expected, and I ended up surrendering to the limitations of technology. At first, I thought Paco had turned into more than a presence among us: I had created a monstruous presence in the space, drawing more attention than I had predicted. But then I felt it would just remind us of whoever we learnt our craft from. The handcraft master carrying a long, ungraspable history. And so, perhaps I would have felt small compared to Paco, even if the projection hadn’t been that big.
My dad and I found at the plaza one of the owners of a shop that sells jarapas, a kind of traditional rug made of fabric rags loomed together tightly. We asked whether someone was still handcrafting them with the looming machine. She said: “Rafaela. She goes there every afternoon. You can ask Rafaela to use the looming machine for you to see”. Neither the technique nor the machine have changed much in several millennia.
What is your esparto?
In the online exposition of Esparto, approached, I described esparto grass as an element that has become central to my artistic practice. Esparto is a vegetal fiber harvested and used for handcrafting in my homeland in Southeastern Spain for thousands of years. As a waning tradition that has found other purposes and contexts of practice in recent years, esparto grass is one of the memory traces that connects me with my family, my land, and the history that they are loaded with. However, when I first encountered esparto while working on Esparto, approached, I had no direct memories of it. This is why this element is a clear example of something I can learn how to re-engage with through the notions of listening and remembering.
Having said that, during Esparto, embodied, I realized that I cannot pretend people at the installations to relate to esparto like I am trying to. Perhaps the point of showing these materials, of re-assembling this process, is that others wonder what “their esparto” is. It might be some specific music, it might be the forest, it might be picking mushrooms, it might be a smell, it might be the sound of fire crackling, or the texture of a tablecloth. Something to pull from, something whose impossibility to be trashed one is aware of. Esparto is, for me, indeed, an element that entangles many other things. It is an element through which I am trying to understand how this re-engagement with the world might work. It is what I am trying to “listen to”, both as a permanent flux and as an intimate thing, as a resonance, an echo of things that I don’t know but that I do know because they were already there, always there. Nadia Seremetakis reflects on a similar idea when it comes to the memory of the senses:
“The sensory landscape and its meaning-endowed objects bear within them emotional and historical sedimentation that can provoke and ignite gestures, discourses and acts – acts which open up these objects’ stratigraphy. Thus, the surround of material culture is neither stable nor fixed, but inherently transitive, demanding connection and completion by the perceiver” (2019, 7).
And so, now I keep wondering what those “objects” are for other people, what “their esparto” is.
Esparto grass is a tricky material. It needs to be soft, if worked with when it is green or “raw”. So, either you collect it the same day from the bush or it needs to be soaked in water in advance, for around 24 hours. The soaking time is important: if it remains too little in there, it will break when used, and if it remains too long in the water, it will stink as it starts to rot. I thought it would be funny if I brought stinky grass to the installation. And indeed, during the setup of Esparto, embodied, the light engineer who was helping me ended up asking whether I could smell something burning. It was the stinky grass. Not burning, just half rotten.
The piece I’m crafting over the course of these practice sessions is a circular piece that is the result of sewing a five-strand esparto braid into a spiral. I started to become aware of the fact that each lap of the spiral would take longer than the previous one, this time multiplying exponentially. I’ve always been crafting in silence. It is so absorbing, requiring a certain absent concentration, that no other distraction is missed. Decisions need to be made all the time, and they are permanently engraved on the piece. After an hour or so, my fingers start hurting, especially the thumbs. Maybe if I did this every day, my hands would become used to it and adapt to this rough material. At the end of each session, my hands bear the smell of the rotten grass, a very earthy smell that doesn’t go away after a first soap wash.
My skills are very limited. The piece is full of imperfections. Paco, my esparto teacher, wanted to sharpen these details, but now I need to wait until my next visit to Spain. Nonetheless, I remember that those pieces made by my grandpa, although masterpieces, didn’t look perfect. You could see the threads, the differences in the thickness of the braids, the cut ends of the strands, etc. But I think this is a nice thing to be able to see, a trace of the doings that shaped the piece. My grandpa had big, rough hands, which you need to braid esparto.
Queti is also my dad’s sister. One day, I went there to see her making some bread. She used to own a bakery, and some remnants of the workshop remain in her farmhouse. The space still smells of yeast. I wanted to record my auntie because she’s missing a knuckle. This happened while operating the industrial machinery she used at the bread workshop. Now her craft as a bread maker is inscribed forever in her body. I helped her pour the flour into the mixture, and she kneaded the dough by hand and quickly shaped the loaves.
Salvi is my auntie. She continued living in my grandma’s place after she passed away. We went to visit one day, and I told her I wanted to record a neighbor called Amparo who had an old sewing machine. She replied: “But your grandma’s machine is here and I know how to use it”. I instantly remembered the sound of the machine floating in that house every afternoon when I used to spend the summer holidays there. Salvi tried to teach me, but I was very bad at coordinating my feet and hands. For her, the machine felt like an extension of her body.
Individual esparto practice back in Finland on Feb 28, Sept 13, and Sept 29, 2025, from top to bottom
Touching, listening
How can crafting be understood as a re-engagement with a material? How does touching allow us to shape the material, and how does this touching of the material shape us back? These were the main questions posed by Esparto, embodied. The notion of touch was meant to allow me to open a temporary window to the ideas of listening that I was developing in relationship to remembrance in a world of disposable nature: ideas of listening as process, listening as reciprocity, listening as re-sounding. Touch is, at the very least, related to listening from a physical point of view: that of vibration, the vibration of the air, and the vibration of the bodies that the air (as a body) touches. And the air touches us, bodies, permanently, and so does sound as vibration:
“Vibrations do not disappear, but dissipate, echoing all the while, for energy is conserved. Every vibration, every sound, hangs in the air, in the room, in bodies. Sounds spread out, they become less and less contracted, they fuse, but they still remain, their energy of vibration moving the air and the walls in the room, making a noise that still tickles the strings of a violin playing weeks later” (Evens 2005, 14).
Touch and listening overlap because of vibrations, because listening consists of being touched by vibrations, and because everything is forever vibrating, every touch could be understood as a process of listening.
When thinking about touching while working on Esparto, embodied, it seemed to me that my understanding of touch was more direct than my understanding of listening. Touching, thus, became an access point to listening. When I think about touch, an image of my hands forms almost immediately: “The hand has, of course, had such a tight hold on the thinking of touch throughout history, that it has even been termed the synecdoche of touch” (Santanen 2018, 226), but still, touch cannot be reduced to the hands. However, when I think about listening, I can hardly picture my ear, and I definitely cannot form an image of the air. The hands are stuff and they engage with some other stuff, perhaps again, perhaps anew. We shape some solid stuff, the material, and the stuff molds back our hands, which are some sort of solid material of a different kind. And this permanent re-engagement is straightforward to imagine.
Still, perhaps in fact touching is just as elusive to picture as listening, precisely because it is not just about the hands, or about the ear. It is not even about vibration only, about being in the air, touching the air, listening through the air. Quoting Luce Irigaray, Sami Santanen points to the tangible as primary, as it “remains the ground available for all the other senses” (2018, 229, original emphasis). This makes me think of Christof Cox’s virtual domain of the background noise, music being one of its actualizations (Cox 2009), although here there is a “background touch”, its actualizations being the other senses. Perhaps Esparto, embodied was supposed to be an actualization of the background touch as background listening.
A space “out of place”
The space contributed to many of the frictions. The space was a friction in itself. Organo Hall is the smallest of the halls at the Helsinki Music Center that I could have chosen for this installation, and perhaps the warmest. However, it is still a concert hall, and it carries a great burden of conventions. From informal feedback, I got the question whether people should have paid more attention to the video or the sound material that filled part of the space. That is, there was the question of how to “attend” the installation. Many of us were so absorbed by our doings that we hardly paid attention to these other elements. The video and sonic materials were also very unintrusive by nature: indeed, these elements were just supposed to cohabitate with one another, including the audience and the performers as part of the whole. No element in the installation was meant to be contemplated independently. They were not meant to draw attention to themselves.
Still, regarding the question posed before, I don’t think there was an expected way to attend the installation. I had envisioned the successful situation of an audience feeling comfortable getting inside the hall, finding their space in there, and doing their craft in the most natural way. But there was no correct way to be in the space because I didn’t know what the space would become once I opened the doors to the audience. People often surprised me with their intuitive behaviors: there were noisy people, shoeless people, messy people, people occupying spaces in the hall that I hadn’t prepared for them to be, out of the tables or pillows, etc. Yet the space was still Organo Hall, a concert hall where they often play early Western music. Esparto, embodied was something “out of place”, something carrying tacitly implied rules and, at the same time, denying them. It was something contradictory in nature. Everyday life materials, such as tablecloths, lamps, and the crafting stuff, were inserted without much of a soft landing into the cold space of the concert hall. It is only now, in its aftermath, that I realize that there is no way in which the installation could have failed, nor succeeded as I envisioned, because there was no “natural” way to be in the space, and there was no “forced” way either: there was no definition of what these could have meant in this case.
Introduction
Esparto, embodied is the second of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. In this exposition, I aim to unpack the research process leading to this event and its outcomes after I opened doors to it on October 18th, 2025, in Organo Hall of the Helsinki Music Center.
The research project in which this series of installations is contextualized aims at understanding listening as a catalyst of remembrance in the context of a world in which things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. The project has been developing through the documentation of my field trips – re-encountering certain places, objects, and voices in my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain –, the re-engagement with the documented material back in Finland, and its re-assemblage at the installations, so that this re-engagement can be further extended to an audience.
The first installation, Esparto, approached, discussed in an earlier exposition on Research Catalogue[1], represented a first attempt at verbalizing some of the ideas derived from working in the field and working with the materials from the field. On the other hand, the second installation, Esparto, embodied, created many frictions emanating from a deeper questioning of those preliminary ideas. This exposition subsequently represents a space where those discomforts can cohabitate with an imaginal supposition of what the third and last installation, Esparto, revisited, could help reveal.
[1] The online exposition can be accessed here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3779770/3779771
An (a)social space
It seems that the communication implied by Paco and me in the video component wasn’t mirrored in the hall. Based on informal feedback, the documentation of the installation, and what I perceived myself as a participant that day, some people felt that communication was somehow denied by how the space unfolded, some others didn’t seem to have the need to communicate, and yet some others did freely communicate when needed. The space wasn’t entirely a social space. It didn’t resemble the situation that one encounters, for instance, at a knitting club. Perhaps the performers at the “balcony stage” informed people not to interrupt the performance, perhaps the tape component was too subtle to invite something other than silence, perhaps the tables and pillows weren’t laid out as if interaction was welcomed. From my experience as a participant among the rest, I didn’t feel I worked in solitude: I felt accompanied yet in my own space. I didn’t talk to anyone; I didn’t directly look at anyone. But I could feel the people around, I heard them, their noises, some of their voices. I felt them moving around, doing. Something from the past collapsed as I could also hear Paco, my esparto braiding teacher, telling me what to do next, and I could hear, in the sound of his hands, the sound of the hands of his neighbor, who had taught him how to craft. Afterward, I kept wondering whether crafting, as a hobby, was still a social activity. When I first planned the installation, I foresaw that I would mostly relate to the material I was working with, and that the rest of the audience would feel like some sort of silent peer support.
How to navigate the exposition
This exposition is non-linear, and so the different elements that it contains can be (re)encountered in any order. Their meaning will always be somewhat loose, being complemented (yet never completed) by other elements in the exposition. The questions that remain open from these loose ends represent the research paths to be further pursued in Esparto, revisited. This introduction is at the center of this virtual space, and all other elements can be found around it, in any direction.
Participants on the floor at Esparto, embodied, in Organo Hall. Photo by Juan Miralles. October 18, 2025
Tape component
The tape part of Esparto, embodied was supposed to fill up the sonic space during the whole time that the installation remained open, including the hour that the performers spent inside following their own “re-sounding” process. At a previous rehearsal, we had considered the possibility of playing alone without the tape during that hour. Alejandro and Martta thought that the tape helped them feel freer not to create a coherent performance out of the time they were given, that is, to organize their sonic material creating a narrative out of it. Playing along the tape provided them a space that was fairly the same as that provided to the rest of the audience for crafting: participants weren’t crafting in silence, and so, performers weren’t relating to their materials in silence either.
The tape part was created with an algorithmic code I developed in SuperCollider. I fed this code with eight different field recordings made at places in my homeland related to esparto grass. I also included four synthetic materials that were supposed to break the illusion that the tape part consisted of a single field recording. Otherwise, the melding of natural materials gave the impression of a single imaginal sonic environment. The insertion of the synthetic sounds was meant to reflect the fact that the field recordings had undergone a process of “re-sounding”: they had accumulated their own sedimentation, they had been re-engaged with at the moment at which they were processed. Finally, I rendered the three-hour tape that was played during Esparto, embodied.
The fact of playing the tape at this space, even if pre-recorded, added a new layer of sedimentation: it provoked a new re-engagement with this sonic material as the performers and participants added their own sonic input, established their own relationship with the material (whether it was closer to paying attention or to a total disregard of it), and allowed it to coexist with them in the hall, and perhaps be transformed by the memories of the event that they carried afterward.
The “balcony stage”
Organo Hall, the venue of Esparto, embodied, has a system of balconies to access the organs on the first and second floors. Placing the performers on the balconies of the first floor, as shown in the pictures, created some kind of distancing between them and the rest of the participants on the ground floor. When I planned the installation, I thought that the performers shouldn’t be at the same level as the rest of the audience because this would draw unnecessary attention to them. Therefore, the balconies were an option to “hide” the performers so that they weren’t looked at, just like one doesn’t often look at a loudspeaker or at a video projector. What I actually did when making this decision was to create some sort of different stage for them to be differentiated from the rest of the participants. A stage that could not be easily accessed with the eyes, but which was definitely felt in that sensation of distance. Perhaps they should have indeed played among us, on the ground floor, occupying the same space, and therefore being granted the same role. Perhaps they should have come inside the space whenever they wanted, just like the rest of us, instead of following this kind of performative procedure of getting inside the hall at the agreed time and leaving when the agreed time had passed. Or perhaps on the ground floor, people would have felt entitled to look at them as if it they were performing for them. People didn’t often look at other people’s crafting, and so this would have created another source of friction.
Listening, remembering
I have been thinking about listening as a catalyst of remembrance, as an access point to it, and about how this process might evidence the disposable nature of the world we inhabit and bring about a certain resistance to such disposability. A disposable world remains strange to us. Always strange. This disposability somewhat resembles Nadia Seremetakis’ concept of “dust”: “Dust is created by any perceptual stance that hastily traverses the object world, skims over its surface, treating it as a nullity that casts no meaning into our bodies, or recovers no stories from our past” (2019, 12). When places, objects, or relations are considered disposable, this provokes a distancing through estrangement. Disposable stuff is stuff that doesn’t create memory. It comes and goes, and when it goes, it piles up, disregarded. But if we could remember this stuff, then it would not seem strange. It would seem familiar. And so, this stuff would feel as if it belonged in the world, or rather as if we belonged with it in the world. But then, how does listening help access remembering? Why listening? As an artist working with sound, listening is my default access point to being in the world. Yet listening is, beyond this trait (limitation?) of mine, close to remembrance from several perspectives:
Listening as flux. Listening can be understood as flux: sound as permanently flowing. The permanence of sound and the awareness of this permanence could allow us to understand the permanence of that which is listened to, allowing as well to permanently re-engage with it and resist the forgetfulness of the discarded (and the discarding itself). “Sound […] is not a ‘thing’, but is sensed instead through the ongoing disturbance of air pressure, which never ends; thus, the very sense of sound compels us to accept a dynamic world always in flux” (Vallee 2022, 521), always unfolding, always becoming. As Paul Simpson interprets from Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas on listening, “it is not what it is, but how it (perpetually) comes to be” (2009, 2570, original emphasis).
· Listening as intimate. Listening can be understood as intimate, and so, it can generate a closeness to or a familiarity with that which is listened to. This closeness poses an alternative way of relating to what we otherwise replace, discard, and forget. Closeness is about the “collapse of distance” that the “passing of sound through – and between – bodies effect” (Paterson 2021, 437). However, this distance is not just physical: it is also the distance of estrangement.
· Listening as resonance. Connecting the previous two ideas, sound can be understood as always being already a resonance, an echo of something else, and so sound is always flowing, but somehow always known. Before it reaches the resonance chamber that our body is, it has already echoed in other spaces, on other bodies, at other times, and so there is a continuous sedimentation process carrying all the spaces, the bodies, and the times within it. Nancy’s thoughts align again with this idea of listening as resonance. As Anthony Gritten points out, “for Nancy, the source of the sound is always present: it is the body as echo chamber, insofar as the body itself only comes to hear what is resonating through it once timbre has always already become resonance and become sound” (2014, 209).
The flowing of sound and memory (and, therefore, the continuity of listening and remembering) contrasts with the remaining of the strata, the endless accumulation of sediments. “Everything and everybody is their own immediate shape, shaping themselves in the proposition of their temporary being” (Voegelin 2018, par. 12), but still being, constantly, demanding “constant new orientation, constant renegotiation” (ibid.), constant re-engagement. Tough always “re-“, always again, or anew.
Revisiting the question of my “compositionship”
“Sensory memory is a form of storage. Storage is always the embodiment and conservation of experiences, persons and matter in vessels of alterity. The awakening of the senses is awakening the capacity for memory, of tangible memory; to be awake is to remember, and one remembers through the senses, via substance. […] [The thing-in-itself] will always be mediated by memory, and memory is concerned with, and assembled from, sensory and experiential fragments. This assemblage will always be an act of imagination – thus opposed to the reductions of realism” (Seremetakis 2019, 18–19).
A re-assemblage of memory. The way Nadia Seremetakis describes sensory memory as a process of assemblage is probably closest to my current understanding of my artistic doings in this project. Positioning myself as a composer has always felt wrong in this context. I have been thinking recently that perhaps what I am doing is not “composing” but “compositing”: working with a bunch of layered strata, sediments, compost, being re-purposed, re-assembled, re-membered. The lowest one is already dissolving into the soil; the uppermost, still distinguishable. Perhaps I don’t think I’m doing research as a composer because I am myself part of the compost, and so it is difficult to distinguish from the other layers or elements of the compound. Perhaps I am reaching the lowest layer.
Martta Jämsä and Alejandro Martín at their positions on the balconies of Organo Hall during the setup of Esparto, embodied. Photos by Pilar Miralles. October 17, 2025
Impossible data
The things we crafted at the installation were not relevant in themselves. There was no need to successfully craft anything, but just to somehow engage with the material. Indeed, craft is described by Glenn Adamson as “an encounter with the properties of a specific material” (2007, 39) and as a “process” rather than a “fixed set of things”, that is, “an approach, an attitude or a habit of action” (ibid., 3–4). Many participants, mainly those bringing their own materials, were carrying out crafting projects that did not start at the installation and that did not end when they left either. These projects were also processes that already existed and remained doing so afterward, and so the installation was just a moment of actualization of these ongoing processes. Other participants chose to use the materials provided at the hall, and many of them left the resulting craft behind before leaving. These things were a “residue” of the process, but they are not disposable. They keep existing in the memories that people carried with them afterward, and in the experience that their hands gained. When we engage with things, we often engage with aspects other than the thing in itself: perhaps a memory linked to it, perhaps a person who created it or to whom it belonged, perhaps its touch or smell, etc.
These objects are not data from the process: the data from the process might rather belong to that category of “impossible data”, data which is “no longer obvious where, or when, […] ends or begins” (Duhn 2017, 13): it is data about the touching of the materials, about the feeling of the hands, about the intimate reciprocity of a process of shaping. How can we turn the hands into data? How is this engagement data, and not the material itself? What a field diary or a recording of these elements would represent is a solidified and mediated version of the thing in itself: “dead matter” (Duhn 2017, 15). Each of our bodies is already a source of mediation, each of them a different one, a very unpredictable one. How to account for this as data?
Table with basic crafting materials offered to the participants at Organo Hall in Esparto, embodied. Photo by Pilar Miralles. October 18, 2025
Live sound component
The performers seemed to have continued doing what they came to do when we first met in April for a workshop. I call them performers, but I think they weren’t really performing. Or rather, they were, but this performance remained open afterward. It didn’t seem to have started when they began to play in the balconies, and it didn’t feel like an ending when they left. When I attended the installation among the rest of the participants, I perceived what the performers were doing as something very close to what we were doing. They just joined us with their instruments and hands, with their sound stuff to be somehow shaped and to shape them back. They were not playing a piece, and they were not improvising either. It felt as if they had joined us in doing some kind of sonic “exploration” that resembled our crafting, as Alejandro Martín described it at the workshop back in April.
The sonic components of the installation, namely the presence of the performers and the tape part, had the joint purpose of re-sounding, that is, sounding out anew, a previous material from the first installation of the series, Esparto, approached. My collaboration with Alejandro Martín, Livia Schweizer, and Martta Jämsä started at that workshop. I started working with Alejandro and Livia, and then Martta nurtured from the documentation of this work and replaced Livia from September onward, as she wasn’t able to attend the installation. During the workshop, we gathered at the Sibelius Academy and spent some time crafting what we originally called “graphic scores” using esparto grass as part of the crafting materials and inspiring them on the video I recorded at the espartal (the place where the esparto bushes grow) for Esparto, approached. We crafted in silence, accompanied by this video and its sound: we produced three scores based on the three basic elements of the video, namely the sea, the wind, and the sun, and we rotated each score so that each of us had an input in its crafting. After this, Alejandro and Livia reacted with their instruments, percussion and flute, to the process they had just undergone. We didn’t use the scores then, and we didn’t use them either at the installation, and so, all in all, they were never “scores”.
I guess my original plan for this “re-sounding” process was the following:
Espartal video → Graphic scores → Performers’ re-sounding
But this rather turned into:
Espartal video → Crafting process of the scores (scores as “residue”, or process as score) → Performers’ re-sounding
The performers were not instructed to meld with the tape part, and they were not instructed either to necessarily interact with each other. As Livia described it at the workshop: “I felt that sometimes I was accepting that we were two, like in nature, things moving by themselves”. They were not instructed either to follow a specific aesthetic. We came up with a set of possible sound materials for each of the three elements (the sea, the wind, and the sun), but they were also invited to explore beyond this collective proposal. I chose the people before the instruments, and so this could have worked with a different set of sonorities. Again, perhaps the resulting sonic materials that come out of the instruments are the “residue” of this process of “crafting” sounds with the instruments, with the air and the vibrations.
We just realized that the scores, as an object, were not relevant and that what was really informing their sonic exploration was the crafting process that had led to the scores and that now continued with their playing. At the workshop, Livia described this situation as follows: “[…] now when playing, I had a feeling that it was just something else. It definitely affected [the playing], the fact of having this time to do something without thinking much, this more intuitive, more gesture-based, transforming something out of what we heard and with the hands. It created a lot of space”. Perhaps the actual “score” then was the material experience of the crafting, as a process that is actualized at different moments, but which remains happening continuously. This process didn’t start in April with the workshop: It was already happening at the espartal when I visited it before Esparto, approached, it kept happening when creating that video for the first installation, and still happened through the crafting at the workshop, and yet still happened during Esparto, embodied, with the performers’ playing. And it will keep happening while I approach the third installation of the series, Esparto, revisited, as the recording of the performers’ playing and their cohabitation with the tape part will feed yet another layer of “re-sounding”.
Here is a small extract of these sonic layers of sedimentation, which show the strata of this “re-sounding” process throughout the three installations:
Snippet from the process of crafting the scores at the performers workshop alongside Alejandro Martín and Livia Schweizer. April 21, 2025
Sonic extract from a run test of the SuperCollider code that I am using to create the tape part of Esparto, revisited
Esparto, embodied was possible thanks to:
Riikka-Maria Talvitie and Laura Wahlfors
Josué Moreno and Ava Grayson
Juan Miralles and Pilar Castillo
Francisca and Paco
Livia Schweizer, Martta Jämsä and Alejandro Martín
Anna Huuskonen-Kuhlefelt and Janne Ikäheimo
Iiro Sivula, Sirje Ruohtula and Mika Kolehmainen
The event was kindly supported by:
Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki
Arts Promotion Centre Finland
The Society of Finnish Composers
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