Inviting Pablo Diserens as artist-in-residence at Espacio Vilaseco, responded to an intuition about the creative possibilities that the environment of Chantada and the Ribeira Sacra could offer to an artistic practice of this kind. Thus, over a period of two months, Diserens collected sonic and visual fragments of the discreet, at times inaudible, local non-human life, which they then manipulated and fused with the anthropogenic sounds of the region’s dams. As a result, a landscape of natural and technological realities materialized, celebrating the interdependence of all living beings while hinting at the impact of human endeavors.

Within the vibrant ecosystem that the artist highlights in each of work of this project, frogs and toads take on a special relevance thanks to the mesmerizing and complex richness of their calls, which even change between day and night. The fascination for these voices, nourished during numerous nocturnal encounters in total communion, led to the eventual desire to immerse themselves fully in another existence and become amphibious.

With this symbolic and grateful gesture, Diserens’ works translate their immersion in the Galician landscape based on experiencing the concepts of porosity and presence. Porosity as a fluid, versatile and permeable quality that leads to a decentering of the self, and that considers life with others rather than next to; presence as a mode of being present, of tuning in, connecting and merging with the pulses of the world.

The exhibition, conceived specifically for the Espacio Vilaseco, consists of a soundscape (“Alytes”) and an audiovisual installation (“Two Lineations”).

In “Alytes”, Diserens plays with the scale and acoustic perspective of the song of the midwife toad (Alytes obstetricans), which inhabit the nearby wetlands, allowing the visitors to experience changes at a spatial, temporal and existential level, as if they shrank and were amid this amphibian concert in the intimacy of a night on the slopes of the Miño river.

“Two Lineations” is a double projection of photographic stills that start in the Sil Canyon and reach a dam before splitting and following two different paths through the landscapes of the region, revealing how these lines form a discrete union between the stork and frog populations.

The visitor will also find some entries from the artist's diary, a vivid chronicle of this two-month stay full of subtle descriptions of the Galician land- and soundscape, where between sleep and wakefulness the anura metamorphosis occurs; as well as the vinyl album turning porous, the soundtrack that vertebrates the whole project, co-published by Ediciones

Vilaseco and forms of minutiae, Diserens' own record label. The album is a meeting of amphibian and hydrographic acoustics obtained with different recording techniques. The buzz, calls and clicks of frogs, insects, bats and birds are weaved with the hums of the region’s hydroelectric power plants to form a luxuriant soundscape that invites the listener to experience that permeable quality and to discover the magnetizing music of this unique place.

Andrea Franco