Songs from the Hill. Sin título I [Untitled I] (2024)
Plaster sculpture
Variable dimensions: 167 x 56 x 30 cm; 154 x 20 x 24 cm; 28 x 93 x 62 cm
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2024.579.3
José Manuel Ruiz Bermúdez’s art revisits the relationship or friction that occurs between the body, objects, architecture and sound. Songs from the Hill (Bird Code) starts from an architectural element inhabited by the artist himself, a column of the BilbaoArte studio. Modelled in clay, it takes the texture and appearance of the finish of this element. However, the artist alters its curvature and the positive aspects in plaster, thus creating new tubular structures. Those new spaces are in turn related to other compartments and constructions of nature, such as birds’ nests or the tunnels and nests of weasels and other species that live underground. Those hollows can thus become places inhabited by bodies or occupied by sounds.
The artist starts from a reflection by the author Noel García López in his book Alarms and Sirens: Sonotypes of Daily Commotion, about what happens when a sound erupts in the quietness of silence: ‘The meanings of space then jostle, overlap and curve. The spaces, and with them their senses, fold up and, suddenly, they are simultaneously object, sound, memory feeling and argument…’.
Alerting, warning, expelling, protecting, attracting, conquering, seducing, breaking wills, mobilising bodies with capacities intrinsic to sound. According to the artist, spaces are consciously and thoughtfully designed to control the settings and the sensations; they condition and shape us, they indoctrinate or stimulate us, they leave us exposed or shelter us.
The way in which we move through and understand the space, the materials and physicality of the buildings affect us. This awareness of designing the spaces makes us think about the non-existence of places stripped of meaning. Such structures also breach hearing.