Territory Worldwide
Maria Thereza Alves has worked with the Guaraní people of the Jaguapiru Reservation in Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil since 1980. Together with longtime collaborator, Guaraní teacher and local reservation leader Maximino Rodrigues, reservation leader Michely Vargas and their community, she begins a conversation; plants that are typically labeled with Latin names in botanical gardens are being named and ho- nored with songs from the Guaraní. For instance, the Guaraní named what we know as Nymphoides humboldtiana with Yvoty mboporã pónhuregua, meaning »five-sided flower of the spirit of the fields and forests: you will go away one day but I will not«.
Using these new songs, voices, and sounds, Lucrecia Dalt composes a unique sound piece inspired by the turbulent, unpredictable, multiplicious nature of the forest. Through these explorations, the complexity of Guaraní thought emerges, as does its relationality to other beings and their surroundings.
The audience is invited to walk through the tropical greenhouse wearing headphones that track each user’s movements to generate individualised binaural sonic experiences. The piece is fully reactive to one‘s position and movement, meaning bodies work as compositional agents, creating a unique journey for each visitor. Through this immersive installation, Alves and Dalt attempt to open a space for the multifarious voices of the forest-organic and inorganic, human and non-human, speculative and lived – while also pointing to their silencing and erasure by European colonists.
»You Will Go Away One Day But I Will Not« was first presented at the main tropical greenhouse of the Botanic Garden Berlin as part of the CTM Festival 2020 and within the project »Natur. Nach Humboldt«, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt.
When being presented at other botanical gardens, the installation will be a new commissioned piece as the artists work with the specific plants that are presented at each tropical greenhouse. The title for the piece could vary as well, to reflect this.
Maria Thereza Alves will choose plants from the collection and initiate a naming ceremony by the Guaraní community of the Jaguapiru Reservation, and possibly also by other indigenous communities from South America, with whom she is collaborating. These new recordings and other sounds will be used by Lucrecia Dalt to produce a unique and immersive soundscape that interacts especially with the location of the plants and the architecture of the greenhouse.
For the installation at the Botanic Garden in Berlin, name plates were produced bearing the Guaraní names and their English translations. These were placed next to the corresponding plant and Latin name plate already present.
Maria Thereza Alves
is a São Paulo-born, Berlin-based artist who has been presenting work internationally since the 1980s. Bearing witness to a host of silenced, unwritten stories, Alves’s work has grown out of interacting with various physical and social settings and working to understand the struggles embedded within them in an effort to decolonise knowledge. For two decades, she has been documenting non-native plant species to chart movement and displacement as a result of migration and the slave trade. The project, known as »Seeds of Change« led to Alves being awarded with the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics in 2017. Alves has exhibited at the Toronto Biennale, Manifesta 12 and 7, the 32nd and 29th São Paulo Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale and in dOCUMENTA (13), among others.
Lucrecia Dalt
is a Colombian producer and pop surrealist who creates restless, cerebral electronics. Trained as a civil engineer with a specialty in geotechnics, Dalt’s pursuit of avantgarde sound brought her to Barcelona and then to Berlin, where she currently resides and runs her own Care OF Editions label. Over the years, she has collaborated with F.S. Blumm, Barbara Morgenstern, Gudrun Gut, Julia Holter, among others, in addition to having contributed to the ›telepathic‹ project »Terepa« with Rashad Becker, Charlotte Collin, Laurel Halo, Julia Holter, NHK‘Koyxen, and Grégoire Simon. She has released on labels such as Other People, Human Ear, and RVNG.
The Usomo System
With usomo it is possible to immerse oneself in fully individual soundscapes that seem to bend physical laws. usomo generates sound in real time and sends it individually to each user, completely independent of other users’ sound experiences. In order to not affect the others and to maximize the immersive impact, the sound is transmitted via headphones.
The system is able to exactly determine the movement of each user through a unique tracking system that calculates the precise position and rotation of each user at an accuracy of 10 cm and 1°. The tracking module is attached to the headphones. The sound is stored on an accompanying smartphone, and played back via special software.
The software is able to generate virtual sounds spatially. All sounds have changeable properties. With every movement of the user, effects such as volume or tonality constantly change. Because the transmission of the sounds is calculated binaurally, the locations of the user can easily identify the source of the sounds they hear.
»You Will Go Away One Day But I Will Not« was commissioned by CTM Festival, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and
Humanities, Botanic Garden & Botanical Museum Berlin, Die Junge Akademie and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, with spatial sound production from usomo | unique sonic moments.