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.