Passage at Port Bou. Personal Concert, for one person at a time
City Library hall of Port Bou, Cataluña, October 1st, 2017.
Personal concert is a concert done for one person at a time: the composer-performer with his/her headphones and the unique listener with the other headphones.
A table, two chairs, and two headphones: the music performer and the unique listener are face-to-face with their headphones.
Anyone can sit in front of the performer, wear headphones and listen: the performer starts the personal concert. The end of the execution will be decided by the one who first will lift the headphones.
No loudspeakers amplification, no audio recording. The concert should remain personal, unique, private, intimate, non-reproducible, and intangible (tangible for only one).
The only recording of the event must be the memory of those who lived it: performer and listener.
Inspired by Walter Benjamin poetic of fragment in this occurrence I have used a laptop, mini midi-mixer, and midi surface. The performance took place in the City Library of Port Bou for a small group of people present for a few days homage and memorial to the great philosopher.
All the performances had an identical duration of 3 minutes.
The public will not hear the concert but shall see and observe performers and listeners; were taken many photos as documents of the "silent" concert.
Read more (in italian):
https://terpress.blogspot.it/2017/10/passage-port-bou-hommage-walter_19.html
English version of this italian page:
On 26 September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou, a Catalan seaside town on the border with France: a stateless person fleeing Nazism, after having abandoned Germany, after having lived in Paris and then in other parts of France, always on the run, after having crossed the border on foot at night, with other people on the run accompanied by a passeur, on rough and inaccessible paths, he arrived in Port Bou on 25 September with the hope of going to Portugal to embark, like many others, for America.
On those very days, the Spanish government had issued a directive providing for the repatriation to Nazi-occupied France of stateless people on the run.
Exhausted by years of endless fleeing, discouraged and desperate Benjamin committed suicide in the night. The directive was in fact not implemented and, it seems, the day after his death he, like his fellow escapees, received his expatriation visa.
Exhausted by years of endless running away, discouraged and desperate Benjamin committed suicide in the night. The directive was not actually enforced and, it seems, the day after his death he, like his fellow escapees, received his expatriate visa.
He was buried in the local cemetery, a small white cemetery, hanging over the small bay: a few years later Hannah Arendt, bound to him by a deep relationship of friendship and cultural affinity, wrote on a visit: 'The cemetery overlooks the small bay, facing the Mediterranean; it is carved in terraces in the rock and coffins are placed in these stone walls. It is certainly one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in my life'.
Walter Benjamin, was first buried under the name Benjamin Walter, so that his Jewish origin could not be deduced from his surname; later he was placed in a mass grave.
In the early 1990s, Dani Karavan was commissioned to create a memorial next to the cemetery as a tribute to the great German philosopher; it is a splendid work that is well worth a visit:
http://www.walterbenjaminportbou.cat/en
https://serge-briez.com/2015/06/19/passages-dani-karavan-portbou/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-7k7MJi1zs
Every two years, at the end of September, a group of people (philosophers, writers, architects, urban planners, musicians, students) get together informally to spend a few days talking in the local library, walking, discussing, around the thought and spirit of Benjamin: passages, flânerie, the poetics of the fragment, borders, escapes, migrations.
Fragments: a sound suitcase. Ephemeral installation.
At the end of September, I was in Port Bou and for the brief time of one morning, in the resonant hall of the civic building where the library is located, I proposed the sound installation 'Fragments': a suitcase resting on the floor, containing things of mine (a passport, an old map of Spain and Portugal, a little black notebook with a pencil) and objets trouvés (a classical plaster sculpture head, a radio and a glass Eiffel Tower, postcards with old pictures of Port Bou - the bay and the huge station - and a map of the village) borrowed from the room I had rented. The suitcase was sonorous: it resonated with the sounds recorded on the previous days in my passages through the places of memory: the former hotel where, as the plaque says, Benjamin 'lived and died', the rambla, a tunnel, the large, partly disused station, the seashore, the Karavan Memorial, the cemetery.
Personal Concert: a concert for only one person at a time.
I made a Personal Concert open to those present: whoever wanted to sat in front, took an audio headphone (I wore the other one) and for that person alone (any form of recording was forbidden: the only possible recording was that of the memory of the two listeners) I made a three-minute 'concert', constructed from sound fragments chosen and mixed live.
Four Listening Walks: audio documentation of day and night flânerie.
Here you can listen to my four Listening Walks, recorded by flânerie at the above-mentioned locations: the geotags show the starting places of the Walks. The recording was made with binaural microphones: optimal listening is through headphones.
1 - Walk-night: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=38326
2 - Walk-day1: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=38327
3 - Walk-day2: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=38328
4 - Walk-day3 (same path as 1-night): https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=38329