Between Bodies :Tijuana, July - September 2009
FILE Festival, São Paulo, Brasil, FIESP/SESI Galleries

Between Bodies: Tijuana is an interactive sound installation connecting visitors’ actions to bodily energies circulating throughout Tijuana, making visceral our links to the vast network of human agency at work in this city. Products assembled at great human cost in Tijuana are sold worldwide, yet media hype would suggest our only connection to the city is through fear. We ingest media’s relentless feed of images and texts sensationalizing drug-related crimes; terrified, most stay away from the city, effecting a growing blockade. The damaging cycle of media-fueled isolation is not unique to Tijuana.

Originally created for the entrance hall of the new International Wing of the Centro Cultural Tijuana, the piece was re-sited in the SESI galleries on Avenida Paulista, for the FILE Festival in São Paulo. Visitors entering the piece experienced the sounds of Tijuana, a city, like São Paulo, often mischaracterized by the press as being dominated by crime. Sounds triggered in the piece sample everyday gestures/communications encountered in the streets of Tijuana. Visitors to the piece in São Paulo described the sounds of labor, play, communications and surveillance as feeling very similar to the sonic textures of their own city.

Pitch, speed, volume, spatialization and layering of the sonic components are variously changed in real time in relation to a visitor’s proximity to sensors. Movement at some sensors allows the dominant sounds to be undercut or replaced by sounds of a contrasting nature. An exploration of physical proximity to these sensors affords the visitor increased co-creative proximity with respect to the sounds of others’ recorded gestures. Thus the encounter for visitors is one in which their bodily gestures meet those of Tijuana residents, affording an attunement to those not-so-distant bodies. Moving towards the sensors, gesturing, trying out just slight-out-of-the-ordinary moves, will allow a visitor to experience and modulate sounds of everyday life in Tijuana, to sense, explore and re-map the sonic traces of an endlessly improvised civic fabric.

The best video documentation of this piece is of the Tijuana version (which has the same sound) and that can be found here:

Between Bodies, video (4 minutes)
Between Bodies, video (8 minutes, expanded version)
videoography: Patricia Montoya
visitors, in order of appearance: Tambor Tamborini, Mely Barragan, Jennifer Donovan.

But if you want to get a feel for the SESI site, here's a slightly sea-sick p.o.v. perspective on the piece, shot while installing the piece - apologies, I had not had much sleep! (note: the piece here is not yet cleaned up and the title for the piece wasn't complete on the wall - it became Between Bodies/Tijuana):

Betweeen Bodies in São Paulo, video (4 minutes)

Links to FILE site and other coverage:

http://www.file.org.br/
http://www.file.org.br/file2009/press_sp/

Some video coverage of installations at FILE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU0Je_abR1k&feature=player_embedded (between bodies about 1:15 into this video)

And here are links to articles on the piece as shown in Tijuana:

Projecto Civico Review on LatinArt.com
Make Some Noise on San Diego CityBeat

Project Credits for Between Bodies:
Interactive Sound Installation: Nina Waisman
PD programming: Marius Schebella
Guides/Translators in Tijuana: Jenny Donovan & Ingrid Hernández

Special Thanks To:
Paula Perissinotto, Ricardo Barreto, Stella Tedesco Bertaso, Cicero Da Silva, Jane de Almeida, Eliane Weizmann, Fabiana Krepell, Anna Mauger, Samuel Rodrigues and Rafael Cardoso in São Paulo; Lucía Sanromán and Carmen Cuenca for generous support at CECUT; Pierre Galaud who selflessly offered his fabulous brains and body along the whole path of this project.