Catastrophe and Utopia in the Experimental Opera, Os desastres da guerra, by Nuno Ramos

Artículo

Resumen *

Ruin has long ceased to be part of the past and become the prevailing condition of thepresent. To ecological disaster are added economic crises and the unravelling of thesocial fabric. We are apparently living in permanent catastrophe. Is a future possibleout of this ruin? Is a world possible out of extinction? A extinc¸ão é para sempre isthe name of a collective project undertaken by Brazilian artist Nuno Ramos betweenMay 2021 and May 2022. Of its seven episodes, I shall focus on Os desastres daguerra, an experimental opera in which the bond between word and sound provides anew portal to escape the media hypervisibility and sensory overload we live in.“Experimental opera” functions as a category that expands the limits of performance orsound installation. It is, in other words, a tool we can use to analyse the differentelements that make up Os desastres da guerra: living paintings revealing corporealfossils, musical scores that make social blindness audible, and sonic catastrophes thatexperience their own reversibility, a possible world of vocal imagination. Información suministrada por el agente en SIGEVA