Please play. Essay about Impossibility

By Iván Navarrete, PhonoGrafic

Traslated by María Teresa Peña, maryterepena96@gmail.com

In the following essay, a hypothetical film is proposed, in the sense of an unspecified possibility as an exercise in imagination in three acts that appeals to the reader’s ability to mentally assemble a film shoot and montage from scenes in various video and audio recordings, and a simple argument based on reflection on “impossibility”, for the time being unfeasible given the conditions of the health contingency due to COVID-19, a virus whose ability to spread through human fluids easily transmitted by air has rapidly globalized, from the vicinity of Wuhan, a region of China, to almost every corner of the world, and has brought humanity into a state of emergency that breaks the way in which we relate to “the others” and to “the environment”, based on the “healthy distance” that establishes that “anyone is a possible carrier of the virus, until proven otherwise”, so it places us all in an area of impossibility, generating a break in the configuration of the social and economic relations that we practice.

The film is set out in three acts which are based on real events, which are presented in retrospect, and in each one there is a face of “impossibility”, from the lack of celebration before an audience of François Baschet’s centenary due to the contingency of COVID-19, the piece “Retorno Eterno” (“Eternal Return”) never performed due to an emergency surgical intervention, a piece that I proposed for the mega offering related to the fifty years of the Mexico 68 Olympics and the massacre of students, to commemorate Baschet’s activation at the Youth Olympics and John Cage’s 4’33 performance for “Monumento de percusión” (“Percussion Monument”) in the “Open Class: My name is Baschet” raised before the institutional instruction of not playing the sound sculpture.

Act I. Impossibility[1]

The scene takes place at the Taro Okamoto Museum in Kawasaki, Japan in May 2020. While walking through the impeccably-mounted exhibition hall space, one can hear the highly reverberant metallic resonances and contemplate the forms of plastic and metallic textures, of saturated and intense colors, both in paintings with pictorial gestures hanging on the walls, and in sculptures that inhabit and give life to the space. It is among the forest of sculptures that we can discover the female silhouette that gives voice to the large metal structures through various ways of percussion and playing, these voices cover the site with an atmosphere not from this world. Sachiko Nagata executes the sculptures of François Baschet in the exhibition commemorating the centenary of his birth and the fifty years of the Osaka Universal Exhibition, in a delightful reunion of the work of Baschet and Taro Okamoto, wherein the spectators are the great absentees. At the beginning we see her jingling a structure of embedded bars and a large metal cone with a thunderous and forceful sound presence, and then subtly playing the metal coiled strings, making them oscillate with brushes, generating slight whispers in the midst of the imposing reverberation of the empty room.

And little by little the resonances of the sculptures begin to subtly mix with the sounds of the world’s radio[2] while, as a “glitch[3]”, a transition of images of the main public squares of the world begins, all of them deserted due also to the contingency of COVID-19, the sounds of the sculptures prevail in the background, while sweeping and aerial shots of the desolation of these spaces are made, finally the scene ends when Sachiko jingles one of the bars for the last time, while the sound is dispersed in the room and the museum lights and the screen also fade to black.

Act II. Eternal Return[4]

The scene is set in the Plaza of Santo Domingo, in Mexico City on November 1, 2018, in the rain the montage of the offerings of the dead shines, the rain and the absence of people mark the scene. The camera slowly pans around the square, “closing-up” the offerings, also marked by archival photographs and images and engravings of the 1968 Olympics students massacre commemorating fifty years of those events. The sound of the rain begins a slow transition towards a “white noise” that subtly enters as the walls of the Church of Santo Domingo and the Old Medicine Palace begin to map out looping scenes of children, it is observed that they are building various metal structures as a team, with brass cones and steel bars, they handle various keys and tools between them, it is observed how they jingle them and the steel bars seem to sound causing laughter, it is also appreciated that they have fun while they work. Little by little, where the mapping is done, the walls are fading and the video is in the foreground, the rain has stopped and the “white noise” is emphasized to mark the absence of audio. As the video progresses, the different features of the children who work in most parts of the world are observed, and a repetitive detail appears, the yellow raincoats they wear, which have the logos of the Mexico 68 Olympics design, then the rain returns and the walls return, the “white noise” remains while the children still hug each other and the screen fades to black. Moments later the screen opens and from a subjective unfocused frame an operating light appears from the operating table, while the image is focused and the hospital sounds come in clearly, the camera opens and closes repeatedly, while in the subjective shot the silhouette of the doctors in surgical intervention is blurred, at the end the rain appears and the Plaza of Santo Domingo is empty in the middle of the night while the screen fades to black.

Act III. Silence[5]

The scene takes place in room nine of the University Museum of Contemporary Art (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo) in Mexico City on June 29, 2017, where people are surrounding a metal structure of almost three meters, with a black base and bars rising behind two large metal cones. A man arrives, apparently a musician, who is preparing himself to start a concert, he takes some mallets and prepares the music stand, bows to the audience and prepares to start, picks up momentum for what seems to be a thundering start and yet freezes six inches from making contact; he remains motionless. At the same time, the sound of the background in the room becomes louder and accompanies the action. As his clock starts ticking, the solemnity of the audience is total, and the tense calm grows thicker.

Little by little, the camera records how in the immobility the performer begins to wield due to the tension of the posture, without ever leaving the total concentration, at one point, a camera approach to the music stand is made and the text “Please do not play – 4’33” can be seen. Finally, the action extends between the concentration of the performer and the tension of the audience, in that moment the audio takes an infinite loop and the image freezes without ever breaking the silence.

1]The scene is based on the following recording: 音と造形のレゾナンス－バシェ音響彫刻と岡本太郎の共振 (Sound resonance and modelling. Baschet acoustic sculpture and Okamoto Taro resonance): https://youtu.be/4kA8hRk3Wp0 [2] Shortwave radio recording during quarantine: https://archive.org/details/murcielagos_20200506/Radio.mp3 [3] Failure or non-lethal error. [4] The scene is based on the following recording: Baschet, Mexico 68: https://youtu.be/7cPk9d4rVtQ [5] The scene is based on the following recording: 4'33 for Percussion Monument: https://youtu.be/pr4EMTgmDlA