The Sirens Song
(series: Invisible Places)
Cláudio Bueno
There seems to be a strange and sometimes perverse seduction among:
Ports and Factories;
Prostitutes and Sailors;
Waters and Wars;
Sirens and Mariners;
Monuments and Men;
Québec and all of these elements!
Possible these issues are more noticed by a tourist (or artist-tourist), than the strong and young Québécois production. These are characteristics which after an organic contact with the city, result in the sound installation The Sirens Song.
This is the installation of a permanent monument, immaterial and invisible, but audible and geo-localized on the river and port margins. Eight women-sirens will be there, singing continuously and maybe perversely, for their husbands, lovers, clients, children and others who are late to back or won’t be back.
These women correspond to those that joined the Merchant Mariners and died at sea. They are: Hannah Baird, Maude Elizabeth Steane, Eliza Kennedy, Jane Johnstone, Mary Elizabeth Oliphant, Lillie C. Cook-Gorbell, Eileen Pomeroy e Bride Fitzpatrick. They worked on ships, mainly with radio broadcasting. Maude, for example, concluded her wireless operator training at the Radio College of Canada before to board.
The monument-installation will be originated by a performance made up of eight women Québécoises singing physically at the river margin. The audio will be captured and subsequently installed in that place through a geo-localized mobile interface. Postcards will be made to invite people to visit the monument and provide necessary information for the work access.
It is an action that can only be experienced by being there, at the chosen point on the river. As anyone who visits the site, facing the river, could be put in place of those women. The work creates a contradiction between the virtual flow of data and sound, and the physical site that receive the installation.
Finally, now, Invisible Places can be understood as a large series of work, that started here in Québec, to be installed elsewhere in the world, in a new poetic, political, critical and / or “monumental” actions.
Related Links
1) Naval & Military Museum
http://www.navalandmilitarymuseum.org/resource_pages/unsung_women/women_mariners.html
2) Janet Cardiff
http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/index.html
3) Marina Abramovic
4) Claudio Bueno website: http://buenozdiaz.net
5) Feist
La sirena
You are heart in the waves
La sirena
You are heart in the waves
You are heart in the waves
Cause you are the end of me
Yeah you
Are the end of me
http://grooveshark.com/s/La+Sirena/umvQc?src=5
6) Richard Serra - Tilted Arc, 1981
7) Robert Smithson – Spiral Jetty, 1970
