Sounds by Jose Val del Omar. Javier Viver speaks about Auto Sacramental Invisible
—18/11/2011
The Sounds of José Val del Omar
Auto Sacramental Invisible: The Message of Granada.
REINA SOFIA MUSEUM RADIO
18/11/2011
Realization:
Pedro Jimenez – ZEMOS98
Locution:
Luis Mata
Thanks:
Javier Ortíz Echagüe, Javier Viver, Chema González, Eugeni Bonet, Beatriz Rodríguez, Chiu Longina, Benito Jiménez and ZEMOS98.
José Val del Omar (Granada, 1904 – Madrid, 1982) has normally been placed in the field of cinema, but if one were to fit a restless and curious subject like the one in Granada, one would have to do so in a broad spectrum. The lost, unknown and forgotten link of the first and second avant-gardes is above all the guarantor of the process as the ultimate tool of a work that faces the revolutionary commission of total art.
El Auto Sacramental: El Mensaje de Granada is an idea-project-work barely sketched in some audios and that surpasses vision to generate, through 12 channels, a story full of ungraspable nooks and crannies and phonemes thrown to the ground to bounce around aimlessly. If “the sound is similar to ashes, you see it, it has a shape, but when you try to grab it it melts, it vanishes, it flies”, the Auto Sacramental: El Mensaje de Granada de Val del Omar is a very big handful of ashes that in this capsule we have tried, without much success, to rearrange and, above all, to divulge.
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Facsimile reproduction of the script El Mensaje de Granada. Catalogue of the exhibition Desbordamiento de Val del Omar, 2011
Facsimile reproduction of the script El Mensaje de Granada. Catalogue of the exhibition Desbordamiento de Val del Omar, 2011
Quotes
Collage made by José Val del Omar and belonging to the “Archivo María José Val del Omar y Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga” identified with R1461a, and fragments of locutions from the soundtrack of Aguaespejo Granadino and Fuego en Castilla provided by the sound archive digitized by Javier Viver for his doctoral thesis Laboratorio Val del Omar
Interview to Llorenç Barber carried out by FAAQ.info for the José Guerrero Center on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition: Overflow of Val del Omar in Granada with license CC Recognition-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Fragments of the Baladilla de los tres ríos by Federico García Lorca in the voice of Rafael Alberti published in a book-CD by Visor Libros. Madrid (2006)
Recreation of the Auto Sacramental Invisible The Message of Granada edited by the collective voluble.net with voices from the domestic archive of Jose Val del Omar, Egyptians from Tahrir Square, the assaults of Gdem Izdik in Western Sahara and the voice of Beatriz Rodriguez.
The sound is similar to the ashes… of Chiu Longina in Código Fuente: The remix, edited by ZEMOS98Javier Viver, author of the doctoral thesis “Laboratorio Val del Omar”: I think that all the meaning of the importance of sound in Val del Omar has to do with the concept of the total show.
There is also a fragment of the Auto Sacramental Invisible, which is a piece that is very interesting, because let’s say that it connects with what will later be his two great works, Agua-Espejo Granadino and Fuego en Castilla.
Val del Omar: (Inaudible) … I think it has to be very good, because there is no doubt that it has to be very good, let’s see, let’s see, how are these two sounds, and now it is, now …
Fragment of Aguaespejo Granadino: he who gives more, has more, God’s mathematics, he who gives more, has more, he who gives more, has more, has more.
Llorenç Barber, sound artist: He is a man who, as a good avant-garde artist, conceives art as a total act, of total revolution, without borders, without limits, without formats, without separations. That overflows through the walls and becomes electronics, and that becomes a multi-focus of media, of expansion of sound. Just as the images escaped through the walls, the sound was not single-channel, nor bi-channel, nor octagonal, but multi-channel.
Javier Viver: There are many locutions in those films, especially in Agua-Espejo Granadino that have their origin in the Auto Sacramental Invisible.
Fragment of Aguaespejo Granadino: Here you have suspense, suspense, stagnation, stagnation.
Javier Viver: What is proposed is to make a broadcast with fourteen independent channels, which are arranged in a room in a spherical shape.
So Val del Omar is mounting an installation, I mean, at that moment a fragment of the script that he had complete of the Auto Sacramental Invisible was made and that script is now preserved with the notes, with many specifications about the work.
Val del Omar: We must teach to look at God through the elemental.
Rafael Alberti reciting a poem by Federico García Lorca: “The two rivers of Granada flow from snow to wheat, the two rivers of Granada, one weeping and the other blood.
Javier Viver: Val del Omar of course is from Granada and he participates, he is a friend of Lorca, and he participates in that regenerationist movement, but of revaluation of a typically Spanish genre like the auto sacramental, which had been forbidden. And concretely he poses a challenge in this piece, because it has a very great degree of novelty, and is to make a sacramental car in which there will not be, let’s say, a scenographic representation, but the whole scenography will be a construction of the spectator when he receives the sound sources.
Fragment of Fuego en Castilla: “Bells touching fire, leave the sky without air, a roof of white fish, make it … ”
Fragment of Aguaespejo Granadino : “Death is only a word that stays behind when you love, the one who loves burns, and the one who burns, flies, at the speed of light, because to love is, to be what you love”.
Javier Viver: Well, they are different voices of characters, in many cases they are things with a degree, let’s say, of abstraction, that are characters, let’s say, that are ethereal, that form part of different realities not associated with a specific subjective character that is, let’s say, building a personality, but they are phenomena like light, like water, and many of those realities appear that are then present in Fuego en Castilla, or in Agua-Espejo Granadino, so, of course, the piece itself needs a lot of acting work after all.
Fragment of a recreation of the Auto Sacramental Invisible: El mensaje de Granada, includes the voice of José Val del Omar, edited by the collective Voluble.net
Tribune (minute 7): “Comrades, comrades, you had everything, you had just enough, and you could know more than you were.”
(unintelligible voices mixing with a military march).Val del Omar: in spite of you, in spite of your children, in spite of your children’s children the forbidden fruit, the unnecessary food, the sterile energy, the force of gravity is a curse, from which man is freed, burning, human, he warns, that the first step is death.
Woman: Woe is me! Where am I?