Berru is a collective of artists who have been developing a series of works based not so much on an idea coming from any artistic discipline but more on the idea of exploring very different mechanisms, concepts and materials. They work with moving images, sculpture, sound and new media, without distinction, and there is always a performative and very dynamic element in all the works they produce.
This dynamic element happens either at the moment when the works are conceived or in the experience the audience makes of them. It is not a form of participation or activation of the works but rather the devices created by these artists demand forms of activity, involvement and participation from their audience. The vita contemplativa gives way here to a sort of vita activa in which the public is called upon to accompany the dynamic process behind developing their works. These are not completed immediately but are a process we are all called upon to accompany and, in some way, to finalise.
Besides the dynamis these artists provoke, they tend to make a very particular use of technology. It is not about expressing a fascination with the most contemporary tools for constructing images and objects but about finding other energetic constellations and expanding the space in which artistic gestures can be inscribed. If, like Heidegger, we understand technology as a set of energies and possibilities for action, then these artists propose to explore with their work those other possibilities that are often somewhat distant from current artistic discourses.
But this understanding of the place the technological element may have in the construction of artistic objects is accompanied by a sort of revelation of the way we use things, that is to say, Berru show us modalities of how to use different tools whether they be sound apparatuses (for emitting or recording sound), computers or physical phenomena such as the energy of magnets, among many other possible examples. It is not about developing a metaphysics of technology but about achieving the movement of discovery of the sensitive ingredients inscribed in technological objects and processes.
One outcome of this understanding is that these artists have developed a very particular operative lexicon in which actions such as cutting, overlaying, welding or mounting are complemented by other forms of research such as, for example, sound research. It cannot be said they are exclusively sound artists, nor do they undertake any sort of criticism in their practice of the stream of images that characterises contemporary life. In this case, sound is a material principle they use. And it is a principle because, as you can see in the performative work presented at ArtWorks (in collaboration with the artist Francisco Antão), they do not work sound like someone sculpts a stone or a piece of wood. No. Sound is assumed as an element they pursue – their creative methodology implies listening – and the construction of the form results from this action. It is not perhaps by chance that the name they chose for themselves immediately evokes the audio matrix of sensitivity and also action: it implies listening (the one who listens to the berru/shouter) but also taking action (the one(s) who berra(m)/shout(s)).
It is a listening that amplifies the sounds contained within things themselves – for example in a metal panel – and that transforms the sound element into a conductor principle through forms. One of the proposals of these artists is to let yourself be guided by the sound and to make sound come before sight (as in the performative proposal presented at the end of the ArtWorks residency) as an element of exploration and knowledge of the world. We could say it deals with a radical proposal because it implies a sort of reconfiguration of the formal, material and sensible conditions for reception of the artworks.
A consequence of the discovery of the layer of sound that covers everything, and which these artists have been concentrating on, is to understand that each individual, each thing, each event, has its own sonority which is a fundamental element of its individuality. But to become aware of this element means opening up a material dimension that usually goes unnoticed. To face this dimension implies taking the works as dynamic devices and not as mere static tools for recording and interpreting the world. It is as if each work, freed from the immobile museological state of contemplation, were to regain its original function of acting in and on the world.
To understand that artistic practice is not only a practice that produces knowledge of things and reality but also a form of action on the fabric of reality itself is one of the consequences of the work of these artists. It is about demanding that works of art, as particular configurations of a certain knowledge of the world, not be neutralised through museological or exhibitionary devices but take up once more their function as tools of action in the world.
Text by Nuno Crespo
Credits
collaboration with Francisco Antão
format: open call resources: iron, audiovisual and electronic material photo & video: Bruno Lança
