JENNIFER ALLORA: Pass me the vacuum cleaner thing again.
This is definitely the spot for the trombone.
It’s going to be like that with that thing, with a hand here.
GUILLERMO CALZADILLA: Yeah.
ALLORA: And then we’re going to have to extend the mouthpiece
so you can actually sit there and play it.
CALZADILLA: That’s perfect. Cymbals.
ALLORA: And then a trumpet over there.
CALZADILLA: A trom... ALLORA: It has to go like up and out like that.
CALZADILLA: Twenty feet in diameter. That’s great. That’s funny.
CALZADILLA: It looks like a gun.
ALLORA: We’ll cut this part out so you can get in closer, but for now at least...
CALZADILLA: Play...play it there to see. Really loud.
CALZADILLA: That’s the tuba over there...
ALLORA: Yeah, and then we have this one, an award tuba...
CALZADILLA: How do you call this thing?
ALLORA: Cymbal. That’s also good.
ALLORA: What we do often with our projects is it’s kind of an excuse to research something.
ALLORA: This here is the same thing, like see how it is like the cannons...
CALZADILLA: Yeah.
ALLORA: This is what the openings are for.
It was for the weapon.
It’s this chance to learn more about something in the world
and be able to formulate some kind of response.
ALLORA: Alright so, this was this one about the…
the sounds for the news networks and
what they use to represent the coverage of the war.
CALZADILLA: Now we’re making basically an archive of music of war
from different times and places in the world.
It’s called CLAMOR.
It’s about music of war, music as a…
as a sound weapon.
CALZADILLA: So for example, there you have a trumpet from the American Civil War
mixed up with a Japanese tuba,
basically sounds of all different eras until today making this montage
that is going to be part of two things.
One is going to be part of a sculpture,
in which basically is gonna be a concert but the band is going to be live musicians,
are going to be inside this object, this sculpture.
ALLORA: From the very beginning of our work together,
we’re interested in materials.
What are the meanings are connoted by the use of certain materials.
CALZADILLA: Certain materials talk or speak of their usage
and have like a practical function.
But you know there’s also this symbolic dimension that a material has.
ALLORA: In the case of CHALK we were just interested in the matter-of-factness
of what chalk is.
It is at once an ideological...
CALZADILLA: Tool.
ALLORA: ...something that you find in the classroom.
CALZADILLA: That is ideological.
ALLORA: But it’s also a geological substance.
It’s...chalk is something that’s found naturally in the earth,
and because of its nature it is ephemeral and fragile.
CALZADILLA: This idea of making these gigantic chalks,
you can write big words, physically, but perhaps also symbolically.
ALLORA: Our idea was to place the chalks
where the governmental buildings of Peru are located.
Every day if they would allow for protestors to go
and make a kind of lap around the plaza,
and that’s your opportunity to publicly voice whatever demands you might have.
ALLORA: The protestors, they realize it was like another way to vocalize
and to make visible their demands.
People were writing they’re for this political party,
and then someone would cross it out and write something else.
CALZADILLA: People writing declarations of love.
ALLORA: And it really became a complex sort of forum
that was all being registered on this floor.
CALZADILLA: It’s not like a sculpture that has one end
or is only used in one particular way.
You have all this multiplicity of positions.
ALLORA: That piece has the potential to actively disrupt what are
the norms of a particular setting.
CALZADILLA: A police squad, they arrested the sculpture.
They took all the chalk, they put them in a military truck …
ALLORA: (INTERRUPTING) They put them in a paddy wagon.
CALZADILLA: … and they took them away.
It shows the limits of free speech in a so-called democratic society,
but also talks about sculpture and about historical references,
about poetic dimension.
ALLORA: This thing that comes from...from Ottoman music.
It’s like this...we argued,
this is I think probably what it made most close to each other
and really defines our relationship as a collaborative and as…
personally is our fighting.
We just like have…
make it an art form to argue with each other, about everything.
But in a way that’s good because it’s kind of like going to battle
because finally at the end of the day when we both have,
you know, gave it our best with each other, we settle on something,
what’s left over is what we both truly agree with and truly find in common.
CALZADILLA: Ah, but it’s more questioning.
It’s this endless...endless questioning of anything but why this and not that.
ALLORA: Exactly. I mean it’s not...not trivial or childlike.
But it’s constantly arguing.
ALLORA: Okay, let’s just try things out now.
That’s the...that’s the point.
CALZADILLA: All right.
ALLORA: At the end those things that we both can’t argue with each other about,
are the things that we tend to then, you know,
use as starting points to move forward in some project of ours.
CALZADILLA: Humor can be beautiful, can be horrific, can be political…
can be poetic, can be transformative.
ALLORA: It can be transformative . . . and it can be critical.
CALZADILLA: But what I like is that physically,
it’s a physiological transformation that this thing there still has affected you.
We finding each other laughing at the same thing
was a recognition that we both identify with this thing.
ALLORA: And that became a way for us to find things in common and identify with each other.
(SOUND OF HORN)
ALLORA: Sometimes, though, we see things that aren’t like a joke,
but it’s rather just this sort of incredible,
absurd, unusual juxtaposition of something that just seems
totally out of place but at the same time seems perfectly sensible and right.
ALLORA: We were interested in the activity that was happening in the Island of Vieques
which is off the mainland of Puerto Rico used as this bomb testing site.
CALZADILLA: This was filmed the week that they opened the land
that was previously occupied for sixty years by the military to the population.
You have people who their entire lives that have never been able to
go around the entire island.
So this is the first time that this entire land is open.
ALLORA: And it felt like some sort of commemorative sound should accompany that,
be emblematic of that popular struggle
which in common terms is usually understood as an anthem.
CALZADILLA: So we looked into the etymology of the word anthem
and we find something that we like much more,
which is the sounding in answer.
And so we call it RETURNING A SOUND.
CALZADILLA: The acceleration of the motorcycle and all the accidents in the roads,
the bumps, generated a score,
a musical composition that was completely accidental.
ALLORA: It was really interesting to see the reaction of that work,
and I remember there was one person who,
he was like screaming when the land came open
and he liked the fact that the trumpet in a way was like a scream.
ALLORA: In Vieques in fact, while there were so many people
who had one thing in common,
get the military out of Vieques,
the majority of them are in complete disagreement about every other aspect of the island.
CALZADILLA: So we somehow wanted to mobilize this discussion.
ALLORA: Through the metaphor of the discussion table
we arrived at this work which we call UNDER DISCUSSION.
(SOUND OF OUTBOARD MOTOR)
ALLORA: We used this person to take the discussion table
into the areas whose fate is uncertain.
There is something in that antagonism or tension
that could be understood anywhere in the world.
While their actions are absurd,
like taking the discussion table of the island and making it a boat,
it’s like a way to confront something which
may seem in general overwhelming
and finding a way to own it and then contribute something.
ALLORA: You know that’s kind of the nature of making art,
is to do that, is to kind of turn something upside down
and then when you see it upside down,
then you start to see it completely differently
and new meanings come out of it.
ALLORA: Both of our backgrounds was informed by studies in the sciences.
Forms like geology, biology, light, we look at through the lens of an artist.
CALZADILLA: Our scientific interest comes in filter,
I think, through absurdity or pure nonsense.
ALLORA: SWEAT GLANDS, SWEAT LANDS was one of the more complicated video projects.
CALZADILLA: Come Christmastime, everyone fries their pork,
you have to fry that pork for hours with your hands.
CALZADILLA: That piece of metal in which the pork is fried,
we had welded to the back wheel of a car
when you accelerate and the pork rotates.
ALLORA: And understanding the logic of the spit as a kind of connection
between these two systems...
CALZADILLA: They had a symbolic dimension.
ALLORA: The guy, he’s not really doing anything,
he’s just sitting there kind of overseeing this…
this activity.
He’s smoking himself so he’s being smoked while the pork is being smoked.
CALZADILLA: This is a very violent image.
ALLORA: I’m interested in that violence of it.
I’m interested in the grotesque and vulgarity of it
because I think it speaks to a kind of excessive overheating of society and violence.
ALLORA: So just to reiterate, they were the first thing was
to use your instruments to make a kind of abstract sounds
that are very strong and loud,
like a siren or an ambulance
or any other kind of reference you want to think about.
CALZADILLA: For us it’s very important,
the idea of having a work that have all these contradictions in itself.
How can you put all these things that have nothing to do with the other one?
Well, you use glue.
You use an ideological glue.
(LIVE MUSIC)
CALZADILLA: This frustration, this absurdity,
this nonsense, this paradox,
all these things constitute part of the meaning of the work.
(LIVE MUSIC)