tekhnē

Portuguese sound artist and researcher living in Great Britain with a clear and deeply grounded practice spanning concert performance, installation, workshops, and academic publications - with several records that reflect and connect these interwoven processes. Matilde Meireles guides her sonic exploration in dialogue with the space in which it is presented, or by evoking memories and recollections of another place brought into a new context. Through field recordings, she crafts layered compositions that lean into the uncertainty of place and time, suspended between tangible environments and their imagined extensions. Invited by OUT.FEST, Matilde presented a new composition - ‘Tangled and in Perpetual Motion’ — which intertwines the Cidade Som archive (the Barreiro sound archive developed by OUT.RA since 2011) with recordings made by the artist herself during an artistic residency in the weeks leading up to the festival. In this mini-documentary by Celso Rosa, we follow Matilde Meireles on a boat trip to Ilha do Rato - one of many field recording excursions - and catch a glimpse of her performance at OUT.FEST, while the artist muses on the nature of field recordings and site-specific projects. 

On her website, Matilde Meireles shared some thoughts on this residency:

“There were no edges, no fixed maps. Tangled and in perpetual motion was a 45-minute sonic drift that deliberately navigated the terrain of ambivalence intrinsic to field recording, dabbling between processed and documental sounds. The interplay served as a means of re-establishing relationships and kinship—not to clarify processes, but to favor suggestion over precision, evoking encounters that often transcend translation.

In this multi-sensory journey I wove together archival material from the Cidade Som sound map (OUT.RA) with field recordings I gathered during my tekhnē residency. I extended these into an improvised performance that sought to acknowledge that we, just like bodies of water, are inextricably linked to everything around us.

Archival materials recorded by Carlos Santos in 2017 including of Barreiro's water treatment station and local water reservoir, created multiple time-spaces when placed in conversation with the additional field recordings: the sounds of multiple bodies of water, mud, sand, atmospheric phenomena, diverse types of boats and everything in between, including the performance venue.

Sounds were no longer anchored to a single location but flowed, bending time, place and scale, intently collapsing into one another in sonic form. The performance was punctuated by Diogo’s voice over a megaphone, announcing the Sunday ferry schedule for Barreiro, as he moved through the venue.”