Darkness and Silence
International Seminar on blindness and deafness in music and art
21-25 March 2024
Inter Arts Center (Bergsgatan 29, 4th floor, 21422, Malmö)
Conferences, Concerts, Film screenings and Exhibition
Artistic Director: Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
-All conferences and presentations will be in English-
21 March
14h-17h - Café Area
Performance
Colin Roche - Le livre des nombres
Diary of a journey of introspection.
The book of numbers is the trace of a performance. Writing a “register” of the solitary world of creators disrupts our relation to time as much as it does the way of recording, listing and of listening to it. The heart — in the physical sense — is invoked here. It is the articulation of an ‘imaginary’.
19h - Red Room
Opening concert by Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
PROGRAM
Colin Roche (France, 1974)
L'électricité - Ambre mystérieuse
for electric guitar
- Four Spanish blind composers -
Antonio de Cabezón (Spain, 1510-1566)
Tiento I en primer tono
for organ transcribed for guitar by Alberto Hortigüela
Miguel de Fuenllana (Spain, 1500-1579)
Fantasia
for vihuela
Joaquín Rodrigo (Spain, 1901-1999)
Tiento antiguo
for guitar
Francisco Tárrega (Spain, 1852-1909)
Recuerdos de la Alhambra
for guitar
19h30 - Black Room
Vernissage
Works by Blandine Brière/Colin Roche, Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Nexus of Textile and Sound (Gertrud Fischbacher & Marius Schebella) and Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
22 March
10h-12h30 - Café Area
Performance
Colin Roche - Le livre des nombres
Diary of a journey of introspection.
The book of numbers is the trace of a performance. Writing a “register” of the solitary world of creators disrupts our relation to time as much as it does the way of recording, listing and of listening to it. The heart — in the physical sense — is invoked here. It is the articulation of an ‘imaginary’.
10h-17h - Black Room // 22-25 March
Exhibition
Works by Blandine Brière/Colin Roche, Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Nexus of Textile and Sound (Gertrud Fischbacher & Marius Schebella) and Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
14h00 - Red Room
Presentation by Carla Pérez de Arce and Mats Sundling
Skånes Taltidning
Blind and visually impaired individuals have been faced with inaccessible and limited information in a more increasingly digitalized society. Skånes Taltidning is a Swedish audio magazine that produces journalistic independent material once a week. With free services and an inclusive vision, we have delivered auditive reports within varied topics since 1966. All with the mission to make the world more accessible. With approximately 880 listeners, our listeners have the possibility to receive informative, inspirational and entertaining audio content. The aim of our work is to provide listeners with visually impairment around Skåne with accessible information centering around news, art, literature, music among other subjects relevant to the group in question. Skånes Taltidning brings therefore impartial information that would otherwise not be easily available for blind and visually impaired in Skåne.
15h - Café Area
Fika
15h30 - Red Room
Conference by Colin Roche
/DESCRIBE
One of my dreams : writing a music score as a novel, in which every sound’s details are described so the music doesn’t even have to exist materially, but just through the imagination of the readers.
As a composer, my path has always been around description. The structure itself of my work is genetic, based on a rhetorical organization.
Music theory is a powerful tool, but it is stuck as long as it remains abstract. It is a language of signs expressing gestures, as corean alphabet is expressing tongue and throat movements, in a way. Even more, description is located in-between thoughts and sounds, where it doesn’t necessarily have to occur. This powerful energy zone, this in-between, is what we usually call silence. Macro-attention to this zone is also acknowledging the existence of alternatives to the definition of music as an ordered complex of sounds.
Colin Roche (born 1974) is a French composer. With a characteristically sensitive approach, Colin Roche's musicality unashamedly tends towards fragility. Each work is the fruit of a visual reflection, manifesting itself through an instrumental device. Details of time, things and events are obsessional.
16h30 - Café Area
Fika
17h - Red Room
Film screening and discussion
Blind kind (NL, 1964 · 25 min)
Director: Johan Van der Keuken
Language: Dutch (with English subtitles)
With the use of montage sequences, voiced over with the observations of the children, van der Keuken was able to use artistic expression to portray the sightless children’s unique perspective of the world. (Source: MUBI)
23 March
10h-12h30 - Café Area
Performance
Colin Roche - Le livre des nombres
Diary of a journey of introspection.
The book of numbers is the trace of a performance. Writing a “register” of the solitary world of creators disrupts our relation to time as much as it does the way of recording, listing and of listening to it. The heart — in the physical sense — is invoked here. It is the articulation of an ‘imaginary’.
10h-17h - Black Room // 22-25 March
Exhibition
Works by Blandine Brière/Colin Roche, Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Nexus of Textile and Sound (Gertrud Fischbacher & Marius Schebella) and Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
14h - Red Room
Presentation by Frederikke Jul Vedelsby
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby (born in Copenhagen, DK) is working across drawing, text, and time-based media. In her work, she is experiencing access to expanded states of consciousness, suggesting irregularity, and addressing the limitations of understanding itself. With and without a camera, she is in conversation with the blind South African-born, San Francisco-based singer, Suzanna Holland, with whom she, whenever possible and daily via text messages, investigates extraordinary vision and connections between things.
15h - Café Area
Fika
15h30 - Red Room
Conference by Gertrud Fischbacher
Textile and Sound (www.textileandsound.org)
Gertrud Fischbacher, University Mozarteum Salzburg
Marius Schebella University of Applied Sciences
Reinhard Gupfinger, University Mozarteum Salzburg
The Nexus of Textile and Sound is a strategic and fully monitored exploration of the creative potential of textile/sound interdisciplinarity.
It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund, Arts-Based Research Programme (PEEK).
How can we make sound tangible and textiles audible?
Especially in learning the different "languages" of textiles and sound, we are trying to find aspects which unite the two worlds.
For example, what is an acoustic curtain, what is the textile analogy to the frequency response of a room?
What is a rough, itchy sound and what is a loud, screaming fabric?
How can we best create the conditions for the interaction of textile and sound to be of new and unexpected insights and knowledge?
How can we best encourage interdisciplinary learning and changing perspectives?
How far can we go in questioning and stretching not only the artistic potential but also the very nature of the of the materials and media we use in our artworks?
Tobias Klettner, a former student and now a teacher at the Josef Rehrl School in Salzburg, had the idea of bringing textiles and sound to his hearing-impaired students, giving them the opportunity to change perspectives and gain insight into other people's sensory experiences.
Somatic sensitivity is the conscious perception of bodily sensations. Textiles, as and in physical contact, are indeed an important, if somewhat neglected, part of our communication. In the combination of textile and auditory art practice, we transform tactile, haptic experiences into sound and make touch audible.
What is the body perception of deaf children, how can parents/teachers convey sound perception to their children/students?
Conversely, how can children of deaf parents make sensory perception tangible for their parents?
Will I be able to find a new way of communicating my sensory impressions?
Will the project significantly change the way I deal with my own senses?
How can I best relearn and retrain my senses?
Gertrud Fischbacher studied visual education and textile design at the Mozarteum University. Exhibition activities at home and abroad.
She ran an art screen printing workshop in Salzburg until 2000, lived as an artist in Berlin and Cologne, where she worked as an on-air graphic designer for n-tv and RTL and as a producer for APTN until 2011.
She has been a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts and Design since 2008, and in 2016/17 she headed the “Textile Design” subject with Christina Leitner on an interim basis.
In 2022, in cooperation with Marius Schebella, she was able to successfully obtain a PEEK project from the FWF for the Mozarteum University. The research project explores the connection between textile and sound, the aesthetic potential of this combination and explores new artistic possibilities of expression.
16h30 - Café Area
Fika
17h - Red Room
Concert by Naoko Hirata
9 Préludes by Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) composed these Preludes between 1909 and 1910 when his deafness completely closed his ears, in this period and until his death he could no longer hear a single note. In 1902 he started suffering hearing problems, being only able to hear high and low pitches very weakly and totally distorted. These Preludes are probably one of the first pieces he composed in silence, without a piano.
24 March
14h-18h - Café Area
Exhibition
Colin Roche - Le livre des nombres
Diary of a journey of introspection.
The book of numbers is the trace of a performance. Writing a “register” of the solitary world of creators disrupts our relation to time as much as it does the way of recording, listing and of listening to it. The heart — in the physical sense — is invoked here. It is the articulation of an ‘imaginary’.
14h-18h - Black Room // 22-25 March
Exhibition
Works by Blandine Brière/Colin Roche, Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Nexus of Textile and Sound (Gertrud Fischbacher & Marius Schebella) and Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
15h - Red Room
Conference by Jan Eric Olsén
Vision, blindness, and touch: a troubled relationship
Although the sense of hearing is at least as important for visually impaired people as the sense of touch, the latter has a more prominent role in the history of blindness. For a long time, it was assumed that touch, above all, replaced vision among blind people. It was the relation between sight and touch, not between sight and hearing, that was foregrounded in the famous Molyneux problem, described by, among others John Locke in the late 17th century: if a person who was born blind were to gain sight later in life, would this person be able to recognize three-dimensional objects merely by looking? The philosophical riddle did not ask about the knowledge and experience that visually impaired people obtain through hearing. In as much as touch was deemed an important sense for the blind, it was conceived as a substitute sense, lagging hopelessly behind vision.
Drawing on the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, pedagogy, and museology, this presentation will provide a few examples of the troubled relation between vision, blindness, and touch.
Jan Eric Olsén has researched the material heritage of visual impairment at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, and written on the history of blindness. He holds a PhD in the history of science and works currently at the department of collections, Lund University Library.
16h - Café Area
Fika
16h30 - Red Room
Conference by Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
Plastic Extension of Music
Plastic Extension of Music is a creative tool for performers to deactivate the historical weight of the praxis in classical music, creating new ideas, grounds and platforms for a different kind of performance. These new metaphorical vehicles allow the performer with its hands to translate the language, gestures and embodied knowledge outside the instrument in other forms of art, rethinking the music and the performance, while emancipating classical music and its performers from our long tradition.
The creative criticism inside Plastic Extension creates infinite and autopoietic methodologies to approach the performance of classical music, allowing an expansion of the music outside the instrument, deepening the practice and creating new knowledge from a different perspective: the plasticity and embodied knowledge of the musical gesture.
Bertrand Chavarria-Aldrete (Lyon, 1978) is an artist with various working methods all originating in sound: performance, composition, poetry, theatre, plastic, and visual arts. Since 2015, his work has extended to include the plastic arts developing a new type of interpretation, an intervention in music performance: “Plastic Extension of Music”.
25 March
10h-17h - Café Area
Exhibition
Colin Roche - Le livre des nombres
Diary of a journey of introspection.
The book of numbers is the trace of a performance. Writing a “register” of the solitary world of creators disrupts our relation to time as much as it does the way of recording, listing and of listening to it. The heart — in the physical sense — is invoked here. It is the articulation of an ‘imaginary’.
10h-17h - Black Room // 22-25 March
Exhibition
Works by Blandine Brière/Colin Roche, Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Nexus of Textile and Sound (Gertrud Fischbacher & Marius Schebella) and Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
11h - Red Room
Presentation and film screening by Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete
Guided by the blind to play for the deaf
Guided by the blind to play for the deaf is an artistic research project aimed to learn tactile and “visual” perspectives of tuned sound from the blind and the visually impaired, and to measure this knowledge against the scientific and pedagogical history of blindness. The objective is to unveil the physical and (in)visible form of music, to use these forms in the development of new methodologies of music transcription through the plasticity of music. The result will be a new music language conceived for the hearing-impaired and the deaf.
The project is carried out by a series of interviews, workshops and a specially designed test, “The Kléndinsky test”.
Unveiling the invisible (SE, 2022 · 17 min.)
Directors: Bertrand Chavarria-Aldrete & Gonçalo Duarte
Language: English and Spanish (with English subtitles)
How does sound look like ? Ana and Carla, both visually impaired, tell us how they “see” and feel sound. This short documentary is a fragment of how sound seems to unveil its mysterious form through the hands and “visions” of the visually impaired.
Bertrand Chavarria-Aldrete (Lyon, 1978) is an artist with various working methods all originating in sound: performance, composition, poetry, theatre, plastic, and visual arts. Since 2015, his work has extended to include the plastic arts developing a new type of interpretation, an intervention in music performance: “Plastic Extension of Music”.
14h - Red Room
Conference by Adam Ockelford
Focus on Music: the impact of severe visual impairment on early musical development
This talk considers the impact of having little or no vision from birth on the development of musical skills and interests. It examines in particular the effect of two syndromes – 'retinopathy of prematurity' and 'septo optic dysplasia' – on early auditory development, and the importance of this for teachers. A number of short case studies are presented, and the work of The Amber Trust – a UK charity devoted to supporting blind and partially sighted children in their pursuit of music – is described.
Adam Ockelford is Professor of Music at the University of Roehampton in London. He was worked with visually impaired children through music for over 40 years. His most celebrated student is Derek Paravicini – see https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_paravicini_and_adam_ockelford_in_the_key_of_genius?language=en
15h - Café Area
Fika
15h30 - Red Room
Film screening and discussion
The stories of Aaron, Alice, Drew, Felix and Jack, a film about teaching children and young people with visual impairment and complex needs (UK, 2019 · 13 min)
Film by : Evans Woolfe Media
Language: English
Music is a potential source of fun and wellbeing for those who are visually impaired and have complex needs.
Each of the five children in the video shows real pleasure in engaging musically with other people; music appears to be unique in its capacity to evoke happiness and a sense of fun.
16h15 - Red Room
Closure