Cum Grano Salis. Season of immersive music
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Cum Grano Salis. Season of immersive music
Architects’ Chapel. Church of San Sebastian.
Atocha Street, 39
March 7 – 20:30 h: The Water Meditation. Menhir
March 21 – 20:30 h: Levitation. Luis Hernáiz
April 4th – 20:30 h: Heartbeat. Lucas Bolaño
April 18th – 20:30 h: Dissolution. Alberto Bernal
End of cycle with:
May 2 – 8:30 p.m.: Rebirth. Fernando Monedero with the recorded voices of the Taizé Choir.
Artistic Director: Jose Delgado Perignan.
Technical director: Fernando Monedero.
Entrance fee: Voluntary. Recommendation 5 euros. (All proceeds go entirely to musicians and technicians)
CUM GRANO SALIS (with a grain of salt), is the title of this cycle of immersive music that is part of the exhibition project Museum of Passions of Javier Viver, which has its headquarters at the Lazaro Galdiano Museum (from 5 February to 4 May) and its subheadquarters at the Chapel of the Architects of the Royal Congregation of Architects of Our Lady of Bethlehem on their flight to Egypt (from 13 February to 4 May).
The worship space does not cease to be a space for reflection and also becomes an exhibition space and a space for the search for the unspoken and the unspeakable. Javier Viver will give corporeality to the chapel’s floor plan, in the shape of a Greek cross, through the use of large printed murals. These photographic images will be taken from his book Révélations (National Artist’s Book Award in 2015), made from images of the Iconography Hospital of the Salprêtrière in Paris. He will also offer an image as a representation of the head, through an immense photograph of 9 meters high and 5 meters wide that will cover the altar of the chapel with an electronic microscopy image of the book Aurelia Immortal that, although on an unrecognizable scale for human beings, is made from a flower petal, which refers to the floral motifs that the architect of the dome used to make the ornaments of the same. These microscopic textures could also appear to be the neurons of the human brain. Finally, the heart is represented by Viver with a salt sculpture, figurative and life-size, which links this exhibition venue with the monumental sculpture that will be on display at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano and which represents Lot’s wife in a reflection on our view of the past through the history of art and the symbols created by humanity. It is precisely this piece that gives the title to the exhibition located in the Church of San Sebastian, A beating heart. In this way, the public who attends to contemplate his pieces or the sound works that make up this cycle will become living cells inside a body. Cells that listen, aware of the immensity of the space that houses them and projected to the cosmos to which the celestial dome under which they are located points.
The cycle is born from the artist’s intention to introduce the sound of the heartbeat into the exhibition in reference to this central sculpture. Thinking about how that sound would behave in that particular space, they encourage the creation of this cycle that seeks to offer a new sensation through multi-channel electro-acoustic works, which give the possibility of offering the proposals in a circular manner around the public so that the salt sculpture is situated on the floor, just below the centre of the dome and around it the musicians and the public, all of them surrounded by a series of loudspeakers connected to the surround system proposed by Fernando Monedero, a sound creator but also a sound technician familiar with these more complex systems.
The main particularity of this cycle is, therefore, the pretension of immersion that it seeks to generate in the public and that it seeks not only to make use of the special acoustics of the architecture that welcomes it but also of its spiritual function and its symbolic load. If Javier Viver focuses on the cross plan of architecture (the body), these sound proposals focus on the circle from which the semi-sphere of the dome emerges and points to the sky (the spirit), as it invites us to introspection and reflection.
Fernándo Monedero’s design, which will be used for all the proposals that participate in the cycle, projects the sound from various sources that draw a circle and the hemisphere that represents the celestial dome of the cosmos.
Circle is also the concept that the participating authors attend to. Birth, meditation, levitation, heartbeat, dissolution (or death) and rebirth.
Voluntary admission price. Recommendation 5€. All proceeds go entirely to musicians and technicians.
