09 Jan 2010

For Nothing by Pedro Torres (curated by AntiFrame), Round the Corner, Portugal

Pedro Torres
For Nothing

Pedro Torres presents at Round Corner, the sound-installation For Nothing, based on the work by Samuel Beckett Texts For Nothing.

Pedro Torres entices us to hear voices that plunge into the emptiness. Murmured vocal blows. Spoken murmurs, whispered, hard to save. Like the sound. Like every other voices we hear and don't want to hear, the inner voices that usually chase us and betray us too often. Is there infinitude of muted sounds that elude us: either because we don't pay them the due attention or just because our hearing ability is formatted between the 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz? And it is this formatting when inconsciently unformatted anguishes us. Then we hear what we don't want to, what we didn't ask to, what we, now, try to forget. Does Memory have a voice? Is music audible in the pauses? Does Trauma have to be silenced?

Texts For Nothing by Samuel Beckett emerges in a pos-war context. Both the historical expansions and contractions are dangerous. All the time architecture has in its present state what it was in the past, obviously not in its original form but in one gained along numerous incorporations in formed later analysis. Maybe because of that Theodor Adorno hasn't defended so much « (…) the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past. » (in Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 242.)

The past appears invisible therefore untouchable – like the voices we hear. But they both exist and will always exist here and there. Regardless of each others' past, particularly of the visitor's, Pedro Torres asks you to try to listen the inaudible because:

«Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I'm far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That's where I'd go, if I could go, that's who I'd be, if I could be.» (Samuel Beckett, Texts For Nothing).

Claudia Camacho

Pedro Torres | (Glória de Dourados, Brazil, 1982) works with video, sound, installation and photography. Graduated by the São Paulo University (ECA-USP), he participated in solo and group exhibitions in Brazil, Spain, France and Germany. He spent five months in an artistic residence in Berlin (2007/08) after receiving a visual arts scholarship for an artistic production at the Fundación Marcelino Botín (Santander, Spain) in 2006/07. He is represented in the Fundación Marcelino Botín and MadridAbierto (sound-art) collections. Nowadays he lives and works in Barcelona. For Nothing is his first exhibition in Portugal (www.pedrotorres.net).

Curated by: AntiFrame –Independent Curating Project presents itself in the international artistic panorama as an ambitious and conscientious initiative for curating and promotion of artistic projects.