| title | Vozes de Magaio |
| year | 2011 |
| location | Aldeias de Magaio, Portugal |
| brief description | A performance project in collaboration with Toine Horvers While walking for 2 days along a route of villages, we connect places with our voices. |
| performed by | Myriam van Imschoot and Toine Horvers |
| curator | Luis Costa |
| photography | Rui, Myriam, Toine |
| further information | sound recordings by Myriam van Imschoot |
| project or event | Voice scapes, the voice in rural landscapes, Binaural Nodar |
Vozes de Magaiao (2011)
In 2011 the Binaural Nodar artists-in-residency program, in the north of Portugal, had as its theme “The Voice in rural landscapes”. Due to our shared interest in language and the voice (speaking and singing) Toine Horvers visual artist and I made a proposal to temporarily connect villages in the remote mountain landscape of Aldeias de Magaio, which forms the spatial and substantive working area of the residency – by the use of our voices.
Every day, in the course of the 3 weeks of our residency, we went for long walks in order to gather information about the positions of these villages in relation to the landscape and to each other, their relative distances and the connecting roads and paths.From all this, a route developed along which we could use our voices to make connections between villages and between places in the landscape. Although we daily trained our voices, we chose not to try out the acoustic possibilities along this route until the days of execution.
During the two days of the festival at which the residing artist’s projects were presented, Toine and I walked, from sunrise to sunset, the above mentioned route which connects ten mountain villages. Using synchronized digital clocks, we made every hour a stop and called out a short repeated fragment of a yodel tune as well as the numbers of the hour. Now and then we were together in one place, at other moments we took different roads or paths, which resulted in performing our calling out at sometimes great distances from each other, for example with each of us in a different village. Even when we couldn’t see or hear each other, we were able to make a connection between two places at exactly the same moment by using the clocks.
Although our singing and counting were synchronised to the second, the great distances, the wind or the echoes of the mountains created delays and distortions.
Here are the recordings of the hourly calls Toine and I performed in the mountains of the Portugal project ‘Vozes de Magaio’ on October 2nd. Every recording is 3 minutes and a half long, the call starts at 1 minute into the recording. Please use headphones for your listening. In the call at 1 pm no human voice can be traced anymore, as we were too far removed from the zoom recorder.
myriamvanimschoot 