Episode no. 111 of Sapere aude - Learning to See, a podcast series by Michael Thallium. Today we have with us the Spanish visual artist Carmen González Castro. The title of this episode is A Dialogue between Disciplines. With Carmen we'll be speaking about the project Dies Nox. In her own words: "Dies Nox is a collaboration between Warwick Blair, the musician who initiated the project, Jeppe Ernst and myself. It is a project in which performance, painting, and electronic music engage in a dialogue about their foundations, so to speak. For its creation, Warwick began by capturing a sound impression after my painting. The result is translated into a series of frequencies that recreate how vibrations naturally travel through the conductive tissues of the human body —muscles, bones, and skin— and how they draw an intimate map of resonances. Lower tones move energy up and down, while higher tones expand vibrations through the torso and limbs. Apart from this, Warwick’s music primarily evokes an atmosphere. Jeppe Ernst introduces a final layer of meaning with a third person who reacts silently to these oscillations, alternating with the previous interpretation. When the dancers pause their intervention, he turns the nearly static body of his performer into an instrument, sounding a score of gestures—a silent music that completes the viewer’s perception. The paintings act as points of gravity within this double dance of gestures, transforming the stage into a tableau vivant. They are traces and anchors of the performers’ choreography, whose movement shapes the lines formed by the peaks of the sonic atmosphere and the volume curves of the audible spectrum. Within the expanded time in which the action unfolds, the viewer is invited into a deep, multisensory listening. Just as the interaction between the performers is not merely formal or aesthetic, but involves conscious attention to the other, the relationship with the viewer is also shaped through intersubjectivity and shared presence, through a common perception that takes place in the here and now. Finally, Dies Nox proposes deceleration, with the body as a site of resistance. The project is articulated as a process of interdisciplinary translation (music, performance, and painting). In this series of back-and-forth processes, the three disciplines reflect on their specificity in relation to one another while permeating each other, opening a hybrid space where gestures, sounds, and matter push against their limits until dissolving them: gesture remains movement while also becoming matter; the pictorial image becomes matter in motion; and sound acquires a haptic dimension, ultimately condensing into one or multiple images. Look people in the eyes. Try to listen. Even if they are silent. That’s what lies behind the paintings and the whole project. We have tried to understand what bodies express when they relate to one another through care and mutual observation, through the idea of action and reaction, or through the dynamic of question and answer—of collaboration and solidarity between us. What the bodies depicted on the canvases convey has become an obsession, because each body is a vital record of the person who inhabits it. I have learned something important: I have come to understand not only the beauty of the body, but also what a body can do—just as Spinoza said, that astonishing capacity to express everything without the need for a single word. The project is now presented in Madrid at Galería Claudia González, and in June of this year in Copenhagen, with funding from the Danish Arts Foundation and SV Festival Sydhavnens Musikuge." Here you are Carmen González Castro's web page: https://carmengonzalezcastro.com
