Um cabo lá, um porto cá takes as its central gesture the negotiation between the longing and the sharing possibilities towards a certain place and time; as its framework, weather permitting, the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre.

The audio tracks in this album record intend to conciliate the intimacy and certainty felt in its own creation, and the remoteness and unpredictability of its own impact. They more accurately ask what it means to look for one place in another, and how to respond to such situation by acknowledging the intrinsic contradictions of unknowing. The feeling of vulnerability emerging as one engages in such negotiation might very well contain the most fundamental question in such contexts where ideas from one place are brought to be exhibited in another: What is it that one has to offer? As varied as these questions could be, the responses might nevertheless return to the very same act, the one of sharing as a first-person engagement.

Instead of searching for answers in the immediate context where the biennial is held, this project involved activating issues discussed in the exhibition as they were perceived and experienced in the natural context of their creation, more than 7,000 kilometers away. It is through this approach that some specific references, abstract interests and concrete conversations have been personified, mediated, and put into circulation in the form of songs. The result of this creates a parallel cosmology found elsewhere, which one can only hope might speak to all those in between the traveled distance. It is in this slippery logic in search of a space of open discussion that one returns not to an assumed truth about things but to the mysterious responses of the self.

The lyrics of each of the songs that together make this cosmology have specific, and yet varied, points of departure. Some points were already references for the exhibition, like in the case of O mesmo espaco solar, a song based on a dialogue between the artists Vassilakis Takis and David Medalla, in Paris around the year 1970, concerning somewhat romantic views of the cosmos that the Greek artist argued for. Some other departure points come from elsewhere. The lyrics from Que cosa é?, for example, puts in consideration the very act of engaging in a public conversation, as it happens with the act of displaying a work of art. From a different point comes a poem by artist Lygia Clark about finding new narratives by circulating the same paths again and again; this poem has been turned into a song too, titled, as the literary piece, Branco.

The lyrics, as instructions for future works, were written and compiled to become potential paths for ideas—starting points in themselves that could later be set into motion at the invitation of four musicians, who would spend a week on the coast of Mexico and give musical shape to these texts. During a week in March of this year, Gustavo Mauricio Hernández, José Gabriel Cardenas, Marian Ruíz, and Ernesto García gathered with me in a recording studio in San Jose del Cabo in the Baja California peninsula to give form to these tracks, while we thought of that remote but certain future context of their presentation.

Acknowledging Brazilian music history, the songs flirt with our personal relationship with it, and intend to respond the questions that were raised above, always considering the spaces of intersection between culture and nature. Such is specially the case of Agua mole em pedra dura, which looks at the continent’s earth and water border as an ever-changing connecting space, reminding us also that the repetition of an act is as a form of significance. Pelas ruas sem nome,
portrays the city of Porto Alegre as a group of word sounds that reverberate almost as a spoken echo.

In the album, a silent track of 3 minutes and 38 seconds intends to evoke the listening experience of a song with same length that is only available to the visitors of biennial in Porto Alegre. The song is the Spanish translation of If You Hold a Stone—an English language song written by Caetano Veloso during his time in exile from Brazil in the 1970s. This song makes reference to the use of stones in Lygia Clark’s late therapeutic work. The political time that forced the Brazilian composer and singer to leave the country also prompted the only instrumental track in the album, which takes its title from a poem written in the Ilha das Pedras in Porto Alegre by Dedé Ferlauto—a political prisoner in the island that now deserted serves as a gravitational force for the exhibition. Tanta vida e um só corpo, muitos dias e estradas e um só olho, tantas vidas e uma só prá ser vivida is, paradoxically, as the shortest track in the album record.

If romantized, Que lindo e erro finally brings again the experience of time and remoteness back into human scale, to conceive the listener inside a complex cultural space in which these works are produced and consumed. Let the result of this collective effort be, not a soundtrack, but a musical reader to the exhibition.

Um cabo lá, um porto cá es un proyecto comisionado por la 9ª Bienal de Mercosur, Porto Alegre, Brasil, con la curaduría de Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy.