quebrada escondida
cuatros, guitars, mandolins, cable and motors
Solo exhibition. OFICINA#1, Caracas, Venezuela, 2014
Instruments, Motors and Soundscapes (Text by Robin Minard)
With his installations for string instruments and motors, Rubén D’hers achieves something very unique, something that lies between music and soundscape.
For his current installation, D’hers has chosen to use typical South American folk instruments such as cuatros, guitars and mandolins. While these instruments may be very familiar to those visiting the installation, their staging is certainly not. D’hers lays the instruments throughout the space, physically defining the outline of his work. A small automated motor is suspended by cable above each instrument and is precisely adjusted in height so as to lightly activate the strings. Upon entering the space, it is the ambiguity created by this staging of the familiar in an atypical setting that first stimulates our senses; at the same time we are mesmerized by the sounds of the installation. Is this music or machine? On the one hand we are drawn into the detail of the individual sounds with our attention being captured by the action of each of the small motors moving on the strings. On the other hand, we find ourselves immersed in the totality of the resulting sound. We are carried away by the organic ebb and flow of the acoustic atmosphere. The sounds of the installation seem to envelop us and define the space anew: a space within a space.
The absence of any performers in the space intensifies the experience of a “natural phenomenon”. The carefully arranged harmonic tunings of the instruments are calculated to remove any tension of a musical presentation. While there is a good deal of technology involved in the realization of such a work, technology is secondary here. Technical elements such as wires are even arranged so as to take on an organic quality, effectively blurring our perceptions of nature and technology.
It is exactly these ambiguities that make Rubén D’hers work so fascinating and appealing: the ambiguity between music and soundscape; the ambiguity between the physical space we are in and the fictive space that is created by the installation; the ambiguity between our perceptions of technology and our perceptions of nature. Is this music or is it soundscape?
Perhaps it is both.
Robin Minard
http://www.oficina1.com/ruben-dhers-quebrada-escondida/
"En la obra de D’Hers, es el campo de acción del sonido el que se expande a través del engranaje sutil de líneas dispersas, una ambientación instalativa donde estructuras mecánicas, cables, instrumentos musicales, cuerdas y artilugios en movimiento se acoplan para desarrollar una atmósfera penetrante. Entrar es desprenderse de todo ante la potencia de un espacio otro, surgimiento de una textura inexplicable construida por la cadencia inesperada que brota de lo no existente, de lo abandonado, de lo inamovible."
LORENA GONZÁLEZ, Contingencia. 23.09.2014. El Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela
