SOUNDCLOUD | Jun 4,2018 | EN
This is the live recording of my final two hours as a member of the OBRΔ project as it happened in March here in Lisbon.
Much has been left and will remain unsaid about this series of events and what they meant to Lisbon and its nightlife. However, looking back and dwelling a little on this enterprise, I cannot part with the feeling of vortex and illusion created at these conclaves as we turned the lights off in this sweaty and windowless room and zoned in. The odd visual ambience as the amalgamation of bodies started to move and sway, the metamorphosis of chatting into whispering, into silence, on the dancefloor as people restrained their interaction and found a new balance with their movement, with their dancing, and felt the overpowering sense of liberation from their physical bodies as the easing mind took over their rhythm… all of this nourished and aided the dissolution of a demanding social interplay we’ve become all too accustomed to, it liquefied its rigidity and it gave new hope. Suddenly the aural experience intermixed with the visual field, space and time evolved into seemingly distant and abstract notions belonging to a different era of linguistics and very much removed from topical understanding. There and then empathy was being born, or at least a preamble for empathy or empathies. Some empathies grew and flourished, others succumbed to the strangeness and failed.
That was a great time for experimentation. I must confess that there was in fact an agenda. As we progressed, there were times when OBRΔ became more than a simple dance event, it became a bonding and a family event, a place in time where humans who could devoid themselves of a black tendency to superiority and control were slowly and gently allowed to enter a phase of deconstruction of the self and thus were convinced to rebuild their desire for equality, for respect. Energy resonated with our bodies, minds interested in free will, affinity and kindness resolved and took charge. I was looking at conscious matter manipulating the oblivious sate of unconscious matter, pushing it deeper, pulling it closer. We were using repetitiveness, the removal of visual references and using sound sources and specific textures and rhythms as odd vantage points from the habitual standards of human perception, they were our tools for bonding.
Then we were chaos, we were compassion.
For a short time, we were free.
To all the people who helped: Thank you.
The artwork is a combination of two minds, the initial works of Paulo Uliarud Uliarud Pereira and its later interpretation by Emanuel Carmo whom I thank for the collaboration on the latter stages of the project. I’m sorry I couldn’t find a way to grace you with the same honourable effort as I did with Ricardo Valentim Nunes, who was the main artist for the first year. But I do owe you and have a warm feeling of gratitude for all you did, which I hope to repay one day. There is, however, enough time for new projects and I’m sure we will work and think together once again.