AN ECHO AFTER AN ECHO
Mariano Mayer
In 1973, the Argentine poet Arturo Carrera published "Momento de simetría". The book, a rectangle folded into four, contains an introductory note on the front and sets of verses written in white letters on a black background. This technique emulates the drawings that galaxies trace as they expand in outer space. The particles of writing pile up as they reach the edge of the page, pulverizing the words and generating readings in different directions. The book proposes the same movement of escape and fold that observing the Milky Way involves and can be read from any point. The variation and repetition of these writing particles form constellations, shards of poems that seem to have exploded. "As for the cosmological code, I would like to add something more," the poet indicates in the introduction, "its assimilation is more about starting a writing method of macro-microscopic observations.” The poetry that Arturo Carrera proposes here is not what is read but what can be seen. The communicative sense is left to the reception.
Close to this attempt to write an imaginary cartography are the sound sculptures of Timsam Harding. These are a series of generative, mobile works whose center is in constant evolution. Each work arises through the activation of a procedure, that of observing oleanders. The attention focused on this plant group arises from the repetition of certain experiences. The constant car trips through the interior of Málaga, the development of sensitive qualities linked to the journey, whose epicenter is the road and what it brings, and the relationship between vibration, air, and sound that a journey provides. The oleander is a shrub with grayish tones, from whose branches few hard-textured green leaves emerge. The variations in tone between the upper and lower sides and the luminosity make them appear silver. Their purple, pink, or cream flowers are grouped in clusters. Their hardiness allows them to grow easily by the roadside, beside a stream, or in a valley.
Rather than evoking a landscape, molding its elements, or reconstructing its atmosphere, Timsam Harding's oleanders grant us possibilities for action and situate us. Beside them, it is possible to recover the perceptive archives of our wanderings by car, motorcycle, bicycle, near the roadsides, cinematic memories, and music videos. The elements affect each other and their ranges affect us. We are bodies in relation to each other and to the elements that make up an environment. This quality explains the presence of sound in "An Echo of an Echo, of an Echo."
Unlike a musical piece, the incorporation of sound unsettles the narrative and temporal nature that music manages. The sonority, constructed through raw recordings from the artist's studio, documents the sounds that the exterior produces, without being ambient. Here, sound acquires a propulsive existence, as it performs the same function as air, it intervenes among the various lighter elements and makes them vibrate. Sound not only provides duration but also offers mobility. The sculptural rebound is slight and the movements harmonize with the sound, acting on a broader level than the auditory and speeding up that perceptive memory, fabricated in a body that observes what happens on the other side of the glass.