tekhnē

Increasingly active in the interstices between sound and performance over recent years, Xavier Paes and Inês Tartaruga Água have been building a deeply singular body of work, in which experimentation, research and meticulous attention unfold across space and time through a sustained engagement with the corporeality of sound-as-vibration. Describing themselves as "avid gleaners", they create works in which materials, often salvaged from the detritus of everyday life and placed in dialogue with their surroundings, are activated through gesture as one or several sound sources. At this edition of OUT.FEST, the duo takes on an unprecedented daily presence: each day brings the presentation of a different work.

‘Berrante’ is an aural choreography that explores the resonance of space through the movement of wooden poles dragged across the ground. A magmatic drone, continually shaped by subtle shifts in timbre.

‘Passage to Crystallization’ employs contact microphones and effects pedals to amplify the frenetic, repetitive gestures of incision and writing on paper, raising an abrasive wall of sound that becomes both notation and a replica of itself.

‘Variations for Spinning Tops No. 1’ draws on the increasingly rare traditional game of the spinning top, transforming the object into a musical instrument and revealing, through its movement, different tonalities that alternately overlap and dissolve into silence.

‘Puro Spirito’ seeks a continuous balance between sound, dance and air through the intense, rhythmic handling of bottles with different resonances, turning the ethereal space between two bodies into an extension of the work itself.

More info: outfest.pt