Transfigured Schönberg      (spanish)


"Today’ dissonance is tomorrow’s consonance…Dissonance is a distant form of consonance".


"According to Adorno, in Schönberg’s method catastrophe is the movement made within it from one work to another".



Transfigured Schönberg forms part of a series of projects executed using remains or failing that, a demolition. It has been said of Schönberg’s work that it shaped the great task of demolition: that of the classical tone system, and that, in a way, it attacked the foundations of the edifice of music… But what can one do once the tone hierarchy has been demolished? Ultimately, approach the tranquil serial edifice. It is the demolition itself, more of a reaction than an action. The action is generated later and implies a new formality. Implicit in the subject is the need (the erotic pleasure of death according to Freud), for destruction, the completion of that which divides. In it we express our radicalisms. But once we confront the process of reconstruction we disregard the collateral effects of the explosion and are only satisfied with a new style of construction. It is simply a cathartic mirage that positions us lightly, for a limited space of time, waiting for future demolitions, both empirical and symbolic ones.

From the point of view of the application of the effects of eviction and forced demolitions the interest of my work has always been found in the process afterwards, in the neglect of the remains of the social wreck and the neglect of the identity registers of the affected habitational plots. This constantly led me to elaborate an alternative architectural plan for irregular settlements both in Brazil and currently in Vietnam. In World like a supermarket Houllebecq reflects on how the contemporary subject, penetrating in its usual universe of steel, glass and signs, immediately adopts the swift pace, the functional and directed gaze corresponding to the proposed environment. But the truth is that that system of application is not necessarily valid for environments not constructed using a perceptible criterion of efficiency. Inhabiting is not just having shelter, an apartment or an assignable module; inhabiting is forming a structure of extroversion and generation of contextual spaces. If the State provides asylum, a lair or refuge only to then disassociate itself from the alterability of the space, of its place and quality, the State is not providing housing, it burrows or entrenches the population; it assists it with shelter but denies it influence. This withdrawal of influence is really an exercise in detraction since that execution of habitational modules is taken away or removed from permanence, in short, from the impossibility of avoiding deterioration. All withdrawal implies loss and all loss implies deterioration but all are subject to the will of the abandoner.

I thought it appropriate to create, a series of projects that included the moment of detonation, of demolishing, of what is ex/inscribed, in their morphological structure. Showing not only that power, and therefore pleasure, lead to deterioration, but that deterioration itself is a source of pleasure. Not only does the addiction to power lead to destruction, but destruction itself can become an addiction. Since inhabiting is possessing, the organs of power that process dispossession are addicted to random or at least insensitive distribution of informal or irregular spaces. In his Manifesto on the Third Landscape Gilles Clément points out that as the land closes up the dynamics of conquest ease off. The life of waste is brief.
This is the function of these projects, to have repercussions on the life of waste in their organisation and duration.

Transfigured Schönberg is comprised of two differentiated spaces.

The first houses the museum montage of the remains. Their distribution in space, suspended as in paralysis, a pause in the process of dispersion of waste.

The second acquires a sonorous, integrating dimension for the spectator. Amongst the dispersion of the loudspeakers, some of them - still working – reproduce a reconstruction, a reinterpretation (with an intention of movement in the sound; that is, creating and defining the spectator’s space), based on the dynamite explosion, of the piece Transfigured night by Schönberg.