The Institute of Advanced Studies (IdEA) at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) will be the virtual stage for a series of activities that will be developed by Argentine composer, musicologist and radio artist Andrea Cohen. Based in France, the experienced sound artist is the new guest of the Artist in Residence Program “Hilda Hilst”, offering an agenda in December that includes a workshop, seminar, performance and interview with experts.
“It is a great honor for me to have received this invitation and I hope to be able to contribute with my activities to promote radio art as one of the most important forms of sound art, to awaken interest on the part of university students and perhaps 'vocations' in some to cultivate this gender”, declared Cohen in an interview with the Unicamp Portal.
Interactive work and collaborative creation will be the main characteristics of Cohen's activities at Unicamp, integrating students and researchers from France, Argentina and Brazil in sound productions and collective experiments. The popularization of digital interaction tools and the internet has opened up a wide range of opportunities for this area of work, such as online radio and podcasts, but sound art and radio art are still little known in Brazil. For the Argentine artist, this medium provides a space of great formal freedom for this genre of artistic expression.
“The development of radio art has to do with the history of each country, but above all with the existence of public, non-commercial radio stations, interested in radio creation, creating spaces for experimentation in this area. Radio art is linked to sound art, and there are artists from different horizons who have dedicated themselves to exploring it: poets, filmmakers, visual artists, musicians and composers”, stated the new IdEA resident.
The proposal for Andrea Cohen's artistic residency was born from the articulation of one of IdEA's transdisciplinary groups, the Sound and Creative Process Studies Group, under the coordination of musician José Augusto Mannis, professor in the Department of Music at the Institute of Arts (IA) from Unicamp, with the collaboration of musician and researcher Janete El Haouli, retired professor from the State University of Londrina (UEL).
According to Mannis, on open broadcasting stations and streaming platforms, listeners are used to following news, programs, reports and various artistic expressions in the format of music, poetry, plays and operas. However, said the professor, it is less common to “perceive a form of art in the radio production itself, in the sound production and transmission”.
“The resources, means and equipment for production and transmission can also characterize a great instrument of artistic creation. We hope that these activities will draw participants' attention to the creative and artistic potential of sound media as means of expression in themselves and expand perception and sensitivity to new narratives and creative proposals that, in a broader sense, can emerge from sound media.” , explained the Unicamp professor.
Calendar
Andrea Cohen's main program at IdEA will be the workshop “Collaborative and interactive sound creation: Sound exchange between Brazil-Argentina-France”, between December 3rd and 15th, offered through a digital platform. With open for subscriptions Until November 22nd, the activity is free and open to students, researchers and interested parties.
In seven three-hour meetings, the initiative wants to allow participants to listen to the sounds that surround them as a way of exploring awareness of the sound environment and listening to the world as music. The exchange will take place with two composers, colleagues of Cohen, and their respective students: Diego Losa, professor at the Saint-Étienne Conservatory (France), and Raúl Minsburg, professor at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (Argentina).
“I must say that radio work, in which I have been working for around 30 years, has led me to learn and value teamwork”, highlighted the Argentine radio artist, who has been promoting the SoundSon sound exchange project for 15 years, with the composer Wiska Radkiewicz, with an artistic and pedagogical focus.
Cohen's first experience in Brazil occurred in 2000, when he produced a radio play for Radio France about Augusto Boal (1931-2009) and the Theater of the Oppressed. On that occasion, she interviewed the playwright and his collaborators in Rio de Janeiro, recorded rehearsals and recorded soundscapes around the city. The work had a second stage in France, where Cohen interviewed members of the Theater of the Oppressed team in Paris, including Brazilian director Rui Frati, producing reports in the French capital region. Twelve years later, she was in São Paulo presenting her SoundSon project at the Centro Cultural São Paulo.
“Perhaps the problem of spoken language – which is one of the language materials of radio – limits access, although there have been attempts on the internet to subtitle radio works on YouTube. However, we know that the web tends to create listening communities based on common interests. On the other hand, the increasingly low cost of good quality recording devices and free editing and mixing software offer the possibility of producing sound pieces independently,” Cohen opined. According to her, in France, there is the emergence of several podcast platforms, generating growing interest among young people. “We see that it is something incipient, but that it is in full development.”
Andrea Cohen's program at IdEA will begin on December 1st, at 13 pm, with the making-of of the performance “Pour la Radio”, with the participation of Diego Losa. The following day, at 13 pm, the seminar “Radio art and collaborative creation” will take place, in which she intends to stimulate reflections and listening to radio works based on her book “Les compositeurs et l'art radiophonique” (“Composers and radio art ”, published by INA-L'Harmattan, in 2015), in addition to some of his collaborative pieces.
Still not published in Portuguese, the publication deals with the privileged relationship with radio of composers who transformed it into a creative space. The work includes an aesthetic reflection and a historical part in which radio pieces by composers Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995), John Cage (1912-1992), Luciano Berio (1925-2003) and Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) are examined. During the seminar – whose registration is open – some of these works will be analyzed and fragments of the works will be heard.
Andrea Cohen's fourth activity will be an interview, on December 8th, at 13 pm, given to invited experts and broadcast in real time on the social networks from IdEA, with space for questions from the public. The interviewers will be four Brazilian artists and producers: Adriana Ribeiro, Julio de Paula, Lilian Zaremba and Regina Porto. All artistic residency activities will be in Spanish.
“Living with Andrea Cohen for two weeks, experiencing listening to her works and working artistically based on her creative proposals will stimulate participants' sensitivity to the expressive richness of radio art”, estimated Mannis, adding that learning and experiencing art are processes of individual construction, prompted by experiences such as those provided by Cohen. “An experience in which there is a great sound artist who will be with us to guide us, drawing attention to some details, perhaps small, but essential for discovering the possibilities of invention that radio art and sound art open to us. And may it be a stimulus for this artistic activity to be more recognized in Brazil, as well as in Argentina and Mexico, where academically and institutionally sound art has a more defined place.”
Professor Janete El Haouli explains that, in Brazil, the practice of sound art occurs through the efforts of musicians, poets and visual and multimedia artists, inside and outside the academy. “As we still do not have institutional channels that cover sound art or public promotion mechanisms and policies, the demonstrations emerge independently. Therefore, IdEA’s initiative and support are of fundamental importance.”
Living in Paris since 1974, Cohen is originally from Buenos Aires and has worked for over 30 years as an author of radio creations at France Culture, part of the public broadcaster Radio France. With a PhD from the University of Paris-Sorbonne, she has dedicated herself in recent decades to academic research, such as studies on the development of acoustic art in France. Among articles and books on different aspects of radio art and musicological topics, she published “Manuel de pédagogie musicale” (Minerve, 2020), which deals with the pedagogical perspectives of sound art, mixed music and musical theater.
Read more:
Making-of of the radio performance “Pour la Radio”
Discover the biography of radio artist Andrea Cohen, new resident artist at IdEA
Learn more about IdEA’s Resident Artist “Hilda Hilst” Program
Registration for the seminar “Radio art and collaborative creation”
Registration for the workshop “Collaborative and interactive sound creation”
