One of a group from Brazil known as the Noigandres poets, Augusto de Campos was intrigued with both the word-images of Concrete Poetry as well as the sounds of the Samba. In an 1983 interview, he stated:
“I like to read tradition as a trans-temporal music sheet, making, at each moment, synchronic-diachronic ‘harmonies,’ translating culture’s past onto a creative present.”
So it is only appropriate that his words have been translated into our creative present by forming part of the piece entitled, “Dias, Dias (Spoken by Caetano Veloso)/Above The Earth/Contacte.” There is something both ancient and contemporary in this work, both foreign and familiar, as the murmured Portuguese words wash over us, the listeners. The mesmerizing quality of the sounds allows images to flow across the mind, and the unhurried cadence of the measured speech evokes sacred incantations. Like the film collage "Rose Hobart" of Joseph Cornell's, as Catherine Corman writes in Sound Unbound, it is “taking us beyond one location with its specific, identifying sounds, to an unlimited space of devotion- what Simic calls the “cosmic church” (p.378).
The image is Cornell's piece from 1963, "Penny Arcade."
No comments:
Post a Comment