Triptych Tropes
Coco Moya (2023)Performed and exhibited at UCM Fine Arts School (2023)
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Coco Moya. Triptych Tropes. Performative conference. Video Capture. 2023.
Coco Moya. Triptych Tropes.
Performative conference. 2023.
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Sound Geomancy, Landscape as score
Abstract
This research, entitled «Sound geomancy. The landscape as a score», deals with how aural thinking is essential to establish a dialogue with our environment and with our inner selves. It wonders how technology, music and nature are assembled in the landscape through the metaphors of sound. Introducing references from the art practice, the musical ethnology, the field of archaeoacoustics and the media archeology, a geo-sonological story is is presented, beginning in prehistory and continuing in Post-history.
When it comes to give meaning, create knowledge, and navigate the world, we can find echoes between indigenous cosmologies, -intended as popular, pagan, and ancestral practices of relationship with matter/spirit-, and the technological culture. Post-internet network culture relies again on magical thinking, according to which all beings -living, non-living, almost living, human, non-human and more than human- are intertwined in resonant kinships. Sonic imagination becomes a geological imagination that crosses the strata of history through musical metaphors and metonymies. In contemporary art practices that use technology to create intelligent objects and places, giving them a voice, listening to their inaudible lives, there is the same ancestral need as human beings to integrate into the world. The place, overcrowded with materials that are media, objects that are alive, voices and memories, is the starting point for works and compositions that are trying to read the landscape.
The territory is crossed by telluric energies and inhabited by cyborg amalgams, shaping a polyphonic writing. One can take it as a score that can be interpreted using rhythms and melismas playing with all this elements and putting them in contact. This is what we call speculative listening of a place, which can intuit with the sound the forces that inhabit it. Under these premises, sound geomancy is formulated as an open tool. A methodology for the interpretation of a place through a more relational than representational kind of music. Transcendental in its wildest materiality. Sound geomancy, in short, proposes a sort of interaction with a complex and interdependent environment, which includes the immense human capacity to imagine, inhabit, and create the world through hearing.
Keywords: sound art, site-specific, geomancy, speculative listening, antropocene, interactive media, sound studies, media archaeology, archaeoacoustics, ethnomusicology, contemporary art.
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PhD Presented at Complutense University of Madrid, 16th January 2023, classified as «Excellent» with a distinction «cum laude» given unanimously for her doctoral thesis.
Thesis Committee: Bárbara Fluxá, Concha García, Paz Tornero, Mikel Arce y Miguel Molina Alarcón.
Coco Moya Laboratory of Art and Research
Magic by contagion
Coco MoyaPerformed and exhibited at
Cruce Gallery, Madrid (2021)
La Panera Art Center, Lleida (2022)
Lithophones, Stones, Speakers, Sound, Coco Moya (2021)
Tenebrescencies, Drawings A4, Graphite and invisible ink, Coco Moya (2021)
Not everything is connected to everything, but everything something is connected to something. Copper wire, ceramic, tin, arduino, speakers, sound. Coco Moya. (2021-22)
Soroll. Drawing on wall, ceramics, speakers, audio. Coco Moya, (2021)
The water meditation. (For Menhir) Ceramic and salt. 20x20cm, Coco Moya, 2019-2020
Salt clock. Installation. Salt and stethoscope, Coco moya (2021)
Geomantic pendulum. Installation, Ceramic, glass, meteorite, magnet, resine, quartz, aluminium. 40x40x50cm. Coco Moya (2020-21)
Self ASMR. Set space for a self-ASMR (using a piece from a previous project “We do not even know if we exist”, made with Rafa SMP) Ceramic, Microphones, headphones, stones. Variable sizes. Coco Moya and Rafa SMP. (2020-21)
Ceramic. Various Sizes. Coco Moya (2021) Video of the exhibition
Magic by Contagion -speculative listening and geological imagination-, is an exhibition about the resonances between indigenous thought, -popular, pagan, and ancestral practices of relationship with matter/spirit- and technological culture, when it comes to making sense, forming knowledge, and navigating the world.
Is about how sound and musical strategies are put into play again and again, before and now, when it comes to establishing a dialogue and a relationship with our environment, and with our intern. How technology, culture, nature and the material are related within the landscape from the metaphor of sound and tactile?
The territory, traversed by telluric energies, and inhabited by cyborg amalgams, forms a polyphonic writing that can be interpreted, through rhythms and melismas that touch the places and put them in contact. Post-internet networked culture re-emerges the idea of magical thinking where all beings, living, non-living, near-living, human, non-human, and more than human, are intertwined in "alien kin."
The minerals in my body also live in my phone and in the mines.
Listening and sound imagination become a geological thought and imagination, which navigates and crosses the strata of all these stories in metaphors and musical metonymies, the basis for a sympathetic, empathetic or contagious magic. In this game of reflections and reverberations, the environment is also our interior, in a mirror game with the landscape.
The works shown, almost all with a tactile or interactive component, invite the listener to experience and experiment, and make up an archive of plastic and sound essays that arise, on the one hand, from my doctoral research entitled "De techno- sound geomancy, the landscape as a score”, where I investigate the interpretation of the territory from intuition and what I call speculative listening. On the other hand, these pieces also arise from work in the Menhir collective, together with the musician Iván Cebrián, and in other experiences with Rafa Sánchez Mateos-Paniagua, María Collado, or Vanesa Bejarano. All networks that also make up a creative space permeable to contagion.
In the works, a way of knowing from the body is manifested above all, which must move, act, and investigate things with the palms of its hands and its palpitations, in an aesthetic proprioception. If listening is a form of contact at a distance, as Murray Schafer would say, it would be about making that contact more intimate, perceiving the sound going through the materials to our skin and our bones.
The sound happens, (from ad-proximity and contingere: touch), in that event, we put ourselves in closeness and contact with everything that in turn listens to us. And in that capacity of the metaphorical imagination to transport ourselves, we discover ourselves on a journey towards microcosmic scales, as Caillois would say about his stones.
Topocosmos that enable us to listen speculatively to the landscape, an interpretive reading of the genius loci that opens up new unpredictable sound territories. An attention to materials and to matter as a medium in itself, as a means of transmitting energy and memory. Common stones and ordinary materials, which activate their metallic, ceramic, resinous or saline flows, through sound.
Coco Moya (2020-ongoing)
Objects of though
Can we think by drawing?
Coco Moya
(2020- ongoing)
Ink on paper
Size A4
SHOP
Celda 42
Coco Moya (2018)Exhibited at
Galerías, Cárcel de Segovia (2018)
Cell 42. Interactive sound installation Site-Specific for the Segovia Prison. 42 bowls, water, cables, arduino and 4 speakers. 2018 This work has been produced site-specific thanks to a grant at the former Jail, and now art cernter at Segovia.
The interactive sound installation uses a lullaby fragmented in 42 bowls with water on the ground. When a visitor touches the water, they release the sound of one of the lullabies, forming an increasingly rich choir, resonating with the cell itself.
An archaic, primitive memory is inscribed in the lullaby, which not only comforts before entering sleep, but also contains more or less hidden in its lyrics and melodies, a series of narratives of fear, melancholy, or paradoxes. This lullaby is a call to sleep. An accompaniment towards the dreamlike and strange, for a prisoner, my grandfather. He wrote the collection of poems Cell 42, while he was imprisoned for three years in the civil war. Before the poems, there is a small non-dedication, which says:
This story is written on water,
Those who lived it, do not know how to remember it,
Those who did not lived it, will not be able to understand it.
Cell 42. Jose Benito Alvarez-Buylla.
Each bowl symbolically collects -as if they were there to save the roof leaks-, the memory recorded in the prison building. The water, the light reflected on its surface, the repetitive and superimposed singing, and the sound that is perceived in the closed space of a cell, bring us closer to a state of meditation and listening that aims to distill the memory of a prisoner's dream, contained in the walls of this jail.