A Closer Listen
“If you don’t get out of the water, you’ll turn into a frog!” Children often hear this dubious scientific claim after spending long hours in an ocean, lake or pool. Pablo Diserens tests the theory during a two-month residency in Galicia, landing on the side of transformation. The artist’s findings are now the exhibition and publication “becoming amphibian” and an album titled turning porous.
Throughout this residency, Diserens was submerged in the sights and sounds of the freshwaters and its denizens. The recordings take place above and below the water, include anuran and human-made sounds, and find Diserens playing bottles and oscillations to accompany the calls of the wild. The “shapeshifting” of the artist’s imagination is mirrored by that of the recording, which blurs the lines between species, as well as between the animate and inanimate. Even the cover photo plays with perspective: what seems at first to be a large school of fish, shot from an airplane, is “a tuft of algae floating on the surface of a pond,” with a water strider (also known as a water bug, pond skater or puddle fly) in the lower left.
Even knowing that the album is amphibious, the opening sound seems like that of a bird. These are the calls of common midwife toads from the slopes of the Rio Miño (male midwife toads carry fertilized eggs on their backs, later transferring them to their legs and leading them to water, where they hatch). After a while, their tones develop into something akin to a flute symphony, joined by the calls of Iberian water and tree frogs, species threatened by habitat loss. Their cries carry into the next piece, in which the drone of a nearby hydroelectric plant seems to duet with the drone of crickets and other wildlife. It’s easy to tell which one is the intrusion, a hum whose volume never flags, forcing others to adapt, to find their own frequencies. Is it any surprise that an angry bird makes its feelings known by attacking the microphone?
“permeable skin” may refer to many things at once: the surface of the water, the skin through which sound vibrates, the thin line between conversation, composition and improvisation. The water beetles make their own music; the hydroelectric plant emits its impassive hums; Diserens matches these with sounds of his own. Blowing into glass bottles, the artist creates a framework in which humans (although perhaps not water beetles) may interpret intervals and harmonies. The pre-existing sounds are integrated into a lattice that seems completely intentional, although only part is. In contrast, the closing piece contains the sound of wind through a cracked sylvan trunk, which comes across like an improvisation for bass flute. The lines are now completely blurred. After returning home, the artist writes, “I’m more frog than human these days,” suggesting an entirely new bank of pronouns that encompasses the entire animal kingdom. (Richard Allen)
Tue May 28 00:01:49 GMT 2024