VOLUTA

PORTUGAL | INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE | NEW CREATION

Maybe a gong isn’t just a gong. Maybe a gong is first a visual revelation of the possibility of the sound it makes, that we imagine it may make, even before we hear it resound through space. Maybe the gong is also a sculpture, an artist’s object, assuming different shapes depending on the projected drawing or on the music it sparked in mental pictures. It can even be that from the variation of the relief and symbology inscribed there have surged other signs, that shatter in symbolic meaning in a visual and sonic world.

João Pais Filipe is a percussionist, drummer and sound sculptor from Porto. Futurist and traditional. Ethno techno. Walking alongside the experimental music scene for long now. In 2018 he debuted with a self-titled solo album. This year he debuts him-self in an installation of gongs built by his own hand, each one sculpted in different shapes and reliefs, of symbols simultaneously archaic and cutting-edge, organic and metallic, sacred and profane, that will be suspended in a spiral (from there originating the title “Voluta”), prolonging the circular trip initiated in his self-titled album. Despite the apparent difference – the musician and the artisanal gong constructor (and of other instruments) for more than 10 years – everything is part of the same cosmology, in which the visual artist also participates and searches with sound for a three-dimensional expression, visionary of a sound. For the Casa do Volfrâmio in Tibães Monastery (Braga) a circular installation of gongs is projected, suspended from sculpted items that can be sonically activated by the visitors. There will be two moments of live performance-concert of physical interaction between the musician and his sculptures-instruments.

Creation and performance João Pais Filipe
Production BoCA
Promotion picture Ana Vieira de Castro
Photographic documentation Tiago da Cunha