ruido ê | GRAPA residency with Sílvia Zayas
ruido ê explores the tensions between different modes of underwater perception and deals, in a speculative and experimental way, with the ecological problem of the effects and impact, sometimes lethal, of anthropogenic noise on the bodies, acoustic systems and orientation of marine animals.
ruido ê works with a species of electric ray called Torpedo Torpedo, a species that lives close to the coast, in urban areas, popularly called “tembladeras” because they make you “tremble” when they shock you. noise ê focuses on perception and the notion of noise, not only as an acoustic impact, but also as the impossibility of reading what we don’t yet know.
The GRAPA accompaniment of Silvia Zayas is planned in an advanced phase of the project, in which the aim is to activate a study group that will function as a space for knowledge transfer and experimentation, in which different aspects that will contribute to the development of a film will be worked through: the construction of a low-tech underwater recording device; a workshop on somatic attention; a session with marine biologists; a collective snorkelling or the recording of a video clip.
The sessions will focus on methodological experimentation and will have a network of collaborators, including artists, scientists and researchers: Mar Medina, Susana Jiménez Carmona, Carmen Pardo, the Sasba Badalona diving club team, Cris Blanco, Xose Quiroga, Miguel de las Heras, Anabel Colmenero, the Catsharks Association, Claudio Barría and Michel André.
ruido ê ruido is a long-term, networked artistic research and production project supported by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation.
Silvia Zayas works on the boundaries between performing arts, film making and expanded choreography. For years now, she has been looking into ways of using the language of film in various other performance devices, working with different types of perception and attention. Her films will attack you through ghosts, holes and exclusion, impossible instruments, underwater experiences, explosions, childish matters and the fiction of memory, strange imagined worlds, historic imprints and all those things that we cannot yet know.
To her, the artistic act is a set of long-term shared research processes. Examples include Jumping Scales (2017-2018), the activities carried out in parallel to the production of O, an instrument she has created with Ana Cortés and Miguel Aparicio, or even this project itself: ruido ê. Her most recent work includes, among others, São Tomé Revisitado (2012), which she carried out in collaboration with her mother, Isabel Serra; Parallax (2016), a light and sound stage work; the films The Boogie-Woogie Ghost (2018) and Puebla (2021), which she made together with María Jerez; the projects Brilliant Corners (2020) and Brillante (2020-2022), both of them as part of the Orquestina de Pigmeos collective; and the individual exhibition ê held in Nave 0 in Matadero Madrid.
