Year

Artists

Country

Materials

Partners

Berru

Portugal

iron, electronic material, audiovisual material, welding machine

Escola das Artes - Universidade Católica do Porto

Berru

open call / Of sound as an action on the world

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.

Full text here, by Nuno Crespo

Credits

collaboration with Francisco Antão

format: open call
resources: iron, audiovisual and electronic material
photo & video: Bruno Lança