Berio Molina (A Fonsagrada, Spain, 1979) develops a body of work that uses performance, film and installation to claim the unknown through sound experimentation. The expansion into these languages is presented as a method for exploring sound, the artist’s primary interest.

Acousmatic listening — when a sound is heard without the source that produces it being seen — and collaborative processes, the presence of the body in action and the decoding of language are all instances visited by Berio Molina in his ongoing research. In a search whose purpose is revealed by the process rather than by an answer, the sonority hidden in objects, actions, events or elements of nature is transformed into an instrument in an attempt to “break with language”. Sound is a kind of spectral presence that permeates all the movements born within his work.

Dislocación, 2022

Sound installation, variable dimensions

Courtesy of the artist.

The nearest coastal town to Coimbra is approximately fifty kilometres away. Despite this, the sound of a boat’s horns can be heard daily throughout this Biennial. Like ghostly presences hovering over the city and between the walls of the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova, Dislocación, a work by artist Berio Molina, reverberates a noise that, despite its familiarity, causes strangeness when heard in this geography. Brought from a ship graveyard in Alang (India), these horns reproduce a noise in the city’s soundscape. This uncanniness alerts us, on the one hand, to the distant future of ecological transition and the maintenance of policies that allow the countries of the “global North” to continue sending their rubbish to the countries of the “global South” and, on the other, to the intense touristification of cities, which may no longer surprise us when we hear the surreal presence of ocean liner horns in Coimbra. It also alludes to the uncertain future of the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova, which now houses the work and whose role as the main venue for this Biennial is under threat.