Rubbing Flint and Pyrite Together

Dear Mrs. Ramón Cruz,

I work for the publisher of Arvo Pärt, Universal Edition Vienna and on behalf of Arvo Pärt I would like to answer your inquiry which reached us from several sides.

 I‘m afraid I can’t offer you a personal meeting between Fito Conesa and Arvo Pärt. Arvo Pärt is not the artist who likes to talk about the way he works and its background. How the creative doubt leads to the discovery of each artist’s own path remains an individual experience.

 I’m sorry I can’t give you better news.

In 2017 I received a call from someone very close who brought news.

The curator Pilar Cruz suggested I be part of the cycle that Espai 13 of the Joan Miró Foundation had in the works. I say had in the works because at that time it was just Morse code that then began to mutate into words, desires and possibilities. A Monster that Tells the Truth was something more than just a cycle, it was a new beginning, a leaving behind of insecurities and a grabbing onto both sides of a well-designed, embroidered nylon fabric.

I decided (as I always do) to protect myself in the process and to try to open doors that would lead in new directions. Pilar and I decided to have an emotional crisis.

———————————————————————————————————

(A piano plays a couple of notes, one after the other, until the sound fades away, without interruption, like a rhythm stretched out in time. A break in this text)

———————————————————————————————————

Arvo Pärt was an obsession and an excuse to start/open up a new path in which to be and become a musician. After all, with all the names and labels, my work is usually placed within the world of musicals, as an Other that belongs in a specific place but also nearby or distant at the same time.

I was going to be a musician, I was going to compose.

My words and wishes of 2017 began to take root in a wild wasteland. I decided to protect myself.

In conversations with Pilar, I was beginning to doubt how to bring all this sound and composition to the theater. How to create a mechanism that would allow me to balance the (supposedly) solemnity of the sound track and the space? How to avoid another label and not become sound art?

The architect Olga Subirós appeared as if she were a character in one of those films that move at the same speed as the protagonist, while the rest inevitably inhabit a common daily life. Olga and I spoke in reverberations, in slow motion, as if discovering or getting a glimpse of some kind of light at the end of the tunnel.

How to create a door/entrance to an amplified/embodied listening? Did it make sense to create a new space within the space? Is ephemeral architecture a kind of potentially expansive device capable of creating transcendent sites of listening?