The Sound of Acre

Zafos Xagoraris about The Sound of Acre: April 2006: When I found out that my proposal has been accepted by the curatorial team of the 27th Biennial with the title Como viver junto, How to live together (Lisette Lagnado, Adriano Pedrosa, Christina Freire, Jose Roca, Rosa Martinez and Jochen Volz), I traveled from Athens to Rio Branco, the small city, capital of Acre. Today the remote jungle of Acre is a Brazilian state at the north-west bordering with Bolivia and Peru. However, before 1902 it used to be part of first Bolivia and then an autonomous country. Acre is famous for the resistance of its people against the destruction of the forests and the struggle of the rubber tappers and their leader, Chico Mendes, received international attention. Just after my arrival at Rio Branco, I met Samarah Lopes and Gesileu Salvatore who helped me to enter the jungle of Amazon. Driving south from the capital to the village of Xapuri (...) we turned to the west, into the forest (...) Some members of the community, friends of Samarah and Gesileu, helped us to follow the pathways that the rubber tappers follow deep inside the jungle. The acoustic conditions were like being indoors and all sounds seemed really loud in this shady, humid and hot environment, which was covered by trees. I recorded sounds of birds, the wind and the rain and I edited them together with voices and songs or programs of the local radio station, called Aldeia FM, in order to produce a compilation representative of the whole area. These sounds are symbols of Acre and when transmitted, they can expand the limits of the area in an immaterial way. September 2006: In the noisy, commercial center of Sao Paulo there is a street called after the capital of Acre, Avenida Rio Branco. This street is the place I selected to install The sound of Acre(....) As far as I know, until this moment, almost a year after the event, the people use the installations, only instead of playing my CDs they hear radio stations or their own music. The loudspeakers were attached on movable metal bases, in such a way that the people of the shops could rearrange their position or protect them during the closing hours. The sounds of Acre were audible simultaneously with the noises of the city; the car engines or the different conversations and the flags were in the middle of many other visual signs. This way the residents or the visitors, the audience of these minimal installations, could only conceive their existence one by one, discovering them as they walked through the street. This sonorous flag decoration of the Avenida Rio Branco created a feast and the accidental strolls of passers-by some kind of parade dedicated to Acre.

Project Room

Deborah Boardman, Lorraine Peltz: PLACE/OBJECT