Vivian Caccuri

– HIGH FIDELITY [HI-FI]
In April 2017, I went to the former headquarters of WDTR FM in Detroit. This used to be a public radio station run by the public schools of Detroit. There I found tapes of shows from the last years of the station that was shut down and sold in the early 2000s. The randomness of this content sounded like an aural hallucination to me for many reasons: I was a foreign observer and these were tapes found in the middle of ruins of the ex-richest cities of the Americas.
Shows presented by kids, political discussions, community engagement campaigns, storytelling, museum visits… the radio program is random and experimental, so I call my composition a spiritual radio hallucination that has one main hit: “Praying Spirit” by the Dynamic Clark Sisters, a famous gospel quartet from Detroit. I also improvised and composed with similar textures, style and sounds, as an emotional expansion of the past from my personal/musical perspective.
The sound system is made from a combination of vintage speakers from the 60s, 70s and 80s and Electro Voice subwoofers that blow three candles on the beat of the music.

– ORATÓRIO (TIDAL WAVE)
Oratório (Tidal Wave) is a sound-based work using subwoofers and lit candles, their ames set in motion by deep rhythms. The ambience is rooted in the Ambrosian hymn Aeterne Rerum Conditor, one of the rst forms of chanting in Western history, practiced by Christian monks. By exploring architectural and musical forms in religion, the artist expands connections and meanings to consider the cultural interrelations between the use of the bass with ritual and cult. As religious Christian music has historically distanced itself from percussion, drums and deep pulses in order to privilege the voice, wind instruments and strings, Caccuri’s musical interpretation seeks sonic forms in which the bass still performs as a vehicle for the mind through body and skin.

– TABOMBASS
“TabomBass” (2016), commissioned by the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, is a sound system composed of stacked speakers, similar to those used at street parties. However, this sound system is composed of subwoofers only, meaning that it only plays low-frequency sounds. Placed in front of them, lit candles move with the displaced air and dance to the rhythm of the deep sounds – basslines composed by artists from the city of Accra, who collaborated with Caccuri after her research in Ghana. Accra received groups of African-Brazilians after the Malê Revolt, a slave rebellion that took place in Salvador in 1835. To this day, their descendants are known as ‘Tabom’ – because, not knowing the local languages, they answered all questions with ‘tá bom’ [roughly translated as ‘okay’]. Caccuri takes this historical background, seeking to expand connections and meanings to consider the Africa-America trajectory, proposing an encounter in which Brazilian musicians and performers improvise based on the African sounds and, through this combination, create a hybrid work of art.

– ODEBRECHT SOUNDSYSTEM
Odebrecht Soundsystem is a baile funk sound system – usually called “paredão” (big wall) or “equipe de som” (translates “sound team”) that was covered with glazing glass, a material that is broadly employed in the civil construction of Odebrecht building company, Brazil’s most corrupt and politically nefast. The sound quality is not compromised with the covering of the reflective screen, on the contrary: sound is empowered and overcharged.

– ADEUS
“Adeus” (Goodbye) consists of a mini sound system with microprocessor devices, FM receivers and antennas, that are able not only to tune radio bands but also to perceive movement. The closer people are from the metal antennas, the more sensitive they become to the FM waves, thereby producing less noise in the decoding of electromagnetic signals and, consequently, more definition in its transformation into sound waves propagated by the environment. The work highlights the important relationship, in the “Silent Walks”, between movement, perception of sound and different territories and domains, here as a metaphor expressed by different FM stations.

– OCO SOUNDSYSTEM
Made in wood and fabric, Oco (translates “hollow”) sound system is a silent and transparent set of speakers, a “shell”, a work-in-progress that allows different amplification technics.

– DUBROOM (FOURTH WORLD)
“DubRoom” is a dark room that contains a sound-installation built with speakers from the Cidade de Deus’ baile funk court. The system plays the reggae song “Quarto Mundo” [The Fourth World] by Gilberto Gil on a loop. There is a periodic sea wave-like change in the song that mutes voices and deepens basslines followed by flashlights that quickly reveals the brutal sound system to the viewer. DubRoom was created as a commission for the celebrate exhibition of Gilberto Gil’s 70th birthday

– CAMINHADA SILENCIOSA
“Silent Walk” is the itinerary of an eight-hour urban tour for fifteen to twenty people. The journey is carried out under a vow of silence and takes the group to places that have special acoustic activity. Buildings and constructions that shelter contrasting sounds, acoustic problems, terraces, isolated neighbourhoods, archives, and religious spaces are some examples of places through which the group traverses. Throughout the day the tour may encounter situations in which one more easily sees the relationship between architecture, privacy, property and intimacy.
At the end of the route, the participants may return to speaking at a specially prepared dinner during which the participants share their impressions and hear the voices of the others for the first time. The walk has been performed twenty times in cities like Valparaiso (Chile), Rio, Sao Paulo, Niterói, Helsinki (Finland), and Riga (Latvia).
The purpose of the silent walk, since its first execution, is to question the configuration of circulation in public and private spaces, understanding urbanism, architecture, and capital as forming agents of the personality of urban spaces. Modifying the way these spaces are visited and used promotes an opportunity for changing the consciousness and deconditioning the participants. The presence of 15 silent people in a specific location also attracts attention, revealing social behavior codes in cities. Throughout its two years of existence and the 20 times it has been held – including two evening editions – the silent walk has visited restricted access locations, under the prerogative of silence. With institutional support from organizations like O Capacete, Casa Daros, Instituto Pivô, and the Swiss foundation Sound Development, the project managed to visit rarely accessed places like the helipad and presidential room at the BNDES in Rio de Janeiro, the cloister at the St. Benedict Monastery in São Paulo, the concert hall called “Finlandia” in Helsinki, the private island Lucavsala in Riga, and many others.

– DISSIMULADO
In this performance, Vivian sings “Airplane Samba”, a song written by the bossa-nova pioneer Tom Jobim, that describes the sight and feeling of looking at Rio’s landscape from an airplane. Each phrase is sang and played in reverse mode. Vivian listens to the recording of the reversed phrase and tries to sing it that way. She then records herself singing backwards and reverses it once more and plays the new version. This process deteriorates two important bossa-nova materials: breathing and the Portuguese language. Vivian was followed by the artist Maíra das Neves who listened to her words and tried to write them down.

– GARGANTA
“Garganta”/”SoftEquator” is an installation where eight people gather in a circle with contact microphones that they are supposed to place on their necks, next to where their throats vibrate with the voice. When they make sounds, their throats are amplified by the outside with a long delay sound, a method that cancels any attempt of forming words or meaning with the voice. What is achieved is an ever-changing unison of the six throats, and as there are no set rules for what sounds they should make, the group finds its own intuitive way of creating harmony, change or movement. The audio of the choral is carefully distributed in space.