O chelpa é a mãe de todas as músicas. ele é o som. aquele que você escuta toda hora, e acha que não repercute, não é canção. viagens no tempo espaço sideral das janelas do seu crâneo. como orquestrar o ruído. é a especialidade da casa.

o chelpa cinema é. cinema imaginário. o som imagina mundo. um ser de som que executa suas entranhas sopro no coração jato de suco gástrico dissolvendo o firmamento. o chelpa, um monumento a esse mundo subterrâneo, de ruídos como a conversa do duodeno com o esôfago ou um enxame de vagalumes no alambique.

o chelpa abrindo suas guelras e convocando os griots do planeta rio. uma grei e sua história fluido na terceira margem do pensamento rio que vem do cervantes ao baixo gávea e vaga além mar, rio que brota inflama a alma dourada e se depara com vozes de mercadores de bagdá manda descer pra ver filhos de ghandi.

salve chelpa, chelpa salve. carregado de imagens, o cinema, o teatro. ali o vivo repercute. o vivo de um nabo no bagaço, de um jamelão fumegando. chelparque de diversões do mundo acústico e descosturado. esgarça daqui, esgarça de lá e o que você tem? chelpa ferro na cabeça.

chelparaíso de texturas, chelpa ferro paraíso, onde você é só um ouvido recebendo insumos do mundo da era do rádio, fazendo seu cérebro eletrônico editar mixar até virar uma coisa só, o som do relógio da central ressoando em seu estômago de jacarezinho.

quem com chelpa fere, com ferro será ferido. o chelpa vem de lá onde o bing bang pediu asilo no útero da terra. onde ela larva. com quantos sonidos se faz um trem? tá ligado? sebaláeu. eu vi o chelpa ali na larva, antes de pai e mãe, apenas o fogo, o fogo.

chelpalavras que vibram num telecoteco legal. uma impropriedade é chamar isso que escuto, você não, agora aqui é “onde as paralelas dão palestras”. chelpa um showroom de barulhos. vasto cardápio de ambiências sonoras, o marcapasso de um desfibrilador à beira do gramado.

chelpa ferro e fogo, a natureza, o espaço cósmico, as dobraduras do colon, se liga na gíria dos átomos da luz e os fótons, bicho veloz como quê. ali naquele acelerador de partículas acertando a hora da terra. hora que se dissolve no ego em movimento. fausto excelência. hip hópera. a falsa valsa da cidade. saravá pra quem é de.

chapar com o chelpa. waly, tantão, cabelo, fausto, musica palavra ritmos avariados pela imprecisão incorporar a massa sonora, atravessar o canal da mancha no tapete da sala. o que leva uma coisa à outra? o swing da canção, a porra de um microssom se atrelar a outro e iniciarem outra vez outra volta de acasalamento entre a terra e o céu, segundo o mito navajo. tudo é galinhagem no poleiro das cotovias.

aqui feliz de ser parceiro deles. meu primeiro poema “duende capenga”, de 1971. colaram nele. tamo junto.

I

Vila Maurina, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, 2008: duas sucatas de aço colorido retorcido, feltro e outros materiais ficam pousadas na entrada do casarão onde um grupo de pessoas dividem salas e escritórios. Quando vejo as sucatas, pergunto a Luiza Mello, da Automática Produções, o que era aquilo. Ela me diz que eram os restos do Maverick 1974 que o Chelpa Ferro usou para fazer o AUTOBANG.

II

O Autobang foi uma performance histórica do Chelpa Ferro, coletivo formado por Luiz Zerbini, Barrão e Sergio Mekler, na Bienal de Artes em São Paulo. A ação ocorreu em 23 de março de 2002. Seis anos antes do meu encontro com as duas sucatas retorcidas e enferrujadas. Em 2002 vivia mergulhado no meu mestrado sobre cultura marginal nos anos 1960 e 1970 e simplesmente ignorava o que estava acontecendo na Bienal de SP. Mas tinha ouvido falar do Autobang. Sua lenda sobre a destruição de um Maverick impecável e lindo cruzou as fronteiras da minha ignorância em relação às artes visuais e tinha chegado aos meus olhos-ouvidos. Me liguei no Chelpa Ferro e sempre que podia visitava suas exposições. Mas não tinha visto o Autobang. Ele era apenas uma história fantástica, um ato heróico, algo que misturava artes visuais, música, uma certa galera carioca que produzia uma cena amarrando essas duas áreas, com Laufer, Domenico Lancelotti, Bacalhau, Léo Monteiro, Berna Cepas, Chico Neves, Dado Villa-Lobos, Fausto Fawcett, Hermano Vianna, cineastas da Conspiração e da TV Zero, atores, performers e toda uma linhagem de trabalhos e pessoas que continuam em plena atividade.

III

Ao passar todo dia pelas sucatas, ficava com essa ideia fixa na cabeça: as sucatas ainda são a obra? Após o batuque destruidor que o grupo e seus convidados fizeram na abertura da Bienal, o carro todo amassado e seus objetos de batuque-destruição ficaram expostos como obra. A performance em si já tinha ocorrido, o momento de instituição do gesto artístico subversivo já tinha passado. O objeto exposto como escultura do ato performático era uma forma de manter vibrando no pavilhão da Bienal a violência poética do ato. Nas palavras de Agnaldo Farias (um dos críticos que observou de forma mais arguta a obra do Chelpa até hoje), o evento do dia 23 de março de 2002: “o Autobang do Chelpa foi insuperável. A abertura da Bienal parou quando eles começaram. O público foi se aglomerando a sua volta, debruçando-se no guarda-corpo das rampas e dos andares acima, atraído e progressivamente tomado pelo batuque amplificado pela parede de equipamentos sonoros. O ritual, pois era disso que se tratava, foi crescendo à medida que o lindo corpo do automóvel paulatinamente passou de acariciado e suavemente percutido a agredido, em uma prova de que a separação entre o ritmo do batimento cardíaco e o da violência é só uma questão de intensidade”. O clímax, atingido quando o público entrou de vez na dança, estendeu-se por um tempo surpreendentemente longo. O ato só acabou quando todos, entre excitados e cansados, foram se escoando lentamente para fora do prédio. O apagar das luzes ajudou a empurrar a massa. Finalmente apagado, o silêncio ocupou o ambiente todo, como se velasse o corpo amassado e morto da máquina, suspensa no alto de um elevador hidráulico”.

IV

O ato do Autobang é um eco permanente sobre sua lataria. Após a bienal, o carro foi compactado (não sei quanto tempo depois). É esse carro compactado e partido em dois que está aqui na Vila Maurina. Olho para as duas partes, leio o que Agnaldo escreveu e vejo que após o velório do ato destruidor que ocorreu na Bienal, hoje temos aqui o seu cemitério definitivo. Os escombros do Maverick 1974 guardam as marcas da violência poética, do momento em que dezenas de pessoas sentiram-se livres para destruir um objeto simbólico do mercado, do consumo, do fetiche pelo objeto sagrado e aurático – o Maverick. Os membros do Chelpa já disseram que sofreram represálias e ameaças de fãs de Mavericks pelo ato (basta ver no youtube os comentários no vídeo abaixo). Por isso vale muito a declaração deles na época, definindo o Autobang como a destruição de algo que todos tinham apego. Pensaram em ficar com o carro, mas “destruir uma coisa que nós gostávamos potencializou ainda mais a ação”. Para o Chelpa, Autobang é um trabalho sobre o som do desejo / da violência / do instinto / do sexo / do risco / do tempo / do medo / da morte / dos detalhes / do universo.

“É um trabalho de macho sobre o amor”

“É um trabalho sobre o trabalho”.

V

E ficava pensando como podiam duas sucatas me causarem tanto impacto quanto a ação que não vi. O texto é sobre isso. Assisto o vídeo, leio sobre o evento, mas a sucata é mais forte, pois é o resíduo material da memória do ato de 11 anos atrás. O Autobang ainda ecoa entre os ferros retorcidos e o Chelpa Ferro conseguiu encapsular um ato decisivo de sua trajetória em um dejeto sem rumo. Olhar as sucatas do Autobang</ sem ter estado lá no momento da destruição é poder vislumbrar como um túnel do tempo a força das marretadas, os urros da platéia, a excitação dos participantes, a euforia dos golpes, o fim necessário do objeto sagrado. Um ato de amor que se tornou dois pedaços tristes porém persistentes de sua altivez, de sua grandeza, de sua nobreza.

VI

Olhando as sucatas, percebo que mesmo que eu não tenha visto o Autobang do Chelpa em 23 de março de 2002, a obra me olha nos olhos, nas frestas de sua distorção. Me olha nos olhos e me diz que seu ato persistirá para sempre na memória de quem, mesmo que de relance, entenda sua força a partir do seu cadáver. Do seu fim, até o seu começo.

A possible (and necessarily inconclusive) genealogy

The experience of living in the contemporary world cannot be divorced from the great diversity of sounds that structure and define it. Some of these are obvious and public, the very din of the urban sprawl that continues to dominate and grow, such as that produced by motor vehicles, aircraft turbines, the concentration of people, sirens, amplified music concerts, car horns, human cries and the machines that occupy factories, offices and streets. Others derive from the ever-shrinking private world, such as the sounds produced by the domestic appliances that do everything at home, the voices that find their way into the ear through mobile or fixed telephones, or the music from various sources and quarters which punctuates the most distinct activities. In spite of the specific circumstances in which they are listened to, these are sounds that not only express certain forms of sociability, but also form an integral part of these.

The fact that the acoustic dimension of the contemporary world is undeniable is not, however, sufficient grounds for its unambiguous inclusion into the symbolic framework that the field of the arts has produced in more than a century of intense noise. Even in the domain of musical composition, most of the noise that surrounds everyday life is ignored, frequently because it does not fit into existing harmonic and rhythmical structures. As a result of this reduced capacity for absorbing sound, the representation of contemporary life is anchored more in visual perception than in the auditory. While the former has taken on board anything that comes to pass before the eye, the sense of hearing appears to fragment, in space and time, the sensory stimuli that reach the ear, deeming only some of them to be relevant and discarding most sounds as non-significant, and thereby rendering them inaudible in the cultural sphere.

Various artists, working in different media, have throughout the 20th century questioned and subverted this cultural exclusion the world imposes on many of the noises this world itself creates. A sketchy genealogy of this affirmation of noise would include, among its earliest protagonists, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, who in 1913 wrote a manifesto where he called for the rejection of the obvious and alienating presence of “pure sounds” in the western tradition of music and advocated the absorption of the “sound-noises” that accompanies the more everyday manifestations of existence. The art of noise should not, however, restrict itself to mere reproduction of what is heard in the world, but should be based on the inventive combination of these noises. This artist therefore built acoustic noise generators (intonarumori), which, crafted fairly crudely out of wood and metal, allowed him to create different sounds and combine them with others.

In the following decades, the ideas of Luigi Russolo caught the attention of artists interested in extending the culturally-recognised acoustic repertoire, which was limited in comparison with other accepted ways of acquiring knowledge about the world. They found an echo especially in the sound experiments led, from the 1940s onward, by the French researcher Pierre Schaeffer, which are grouped under the broad appellation of “concrete music”. The main emphasis of this output, however, was no longer on the primary generation of various kinds of noise, but on the comprehensive manipulation of previously recorded sounds. Drawing on the alteration of the mechanical procedures for reproducing already existing records or on isolating a recorded sound fragment in order to deal with it independently, the main interest of this research lay less in the events generating noise than in the intrinsic qualities of the sounds that these produced. This movement thus advocated a new sensibility known as “reduced listening”, which was supposedly capable of extending our understanding of how to listen to the world around us.

The task of extending the presence of sound in the sensible world—thereby combating the dominance of the image in this field of knowledge—was taken up simultaneously by the North American composer John Cage. Cage went against the growing technically and aesthetically inward-looking cast of work associated with “concrete music”, emphasizing the intimate relation between sounds and the things that gave rise to them. For this reason, in his early compositions, he juxtaposed and mixed together noises that clearly came from domestic objects and others obtained by banging or slapping his piano. Later he gave up control as to the choice of sources, and the duration or the intensity of the noises that he incorporated into his music, making it quite simply equivalent to all the non-intentional sounds that occur in a given space during a specific period of time. Finally, he diluted down any territorial restriction for grouping together noises recorded, given the technological resources available, from any place he had access to them (including the sounds made by the human body itself), incorporating these into the domain of music. Countering the idea that sound should be experienced in chunks, he first developed the idea of a continuous field of sound, although this was always tied to a specific context.

This two parallel and simultaneous approaches—one highlighting sound as an exclusive manifestation, separated from other things in the world, and the other making it contiguous with other sensory spheres—left a stamp on the work of many artists in the following decades. For some, what was more important was the abstract, formal and self-referential character of sound, through which one should be able to perceive one’s surroundings from a viewpoint whose cognitive power had, until then, been disdained. For others, it should be understood as an amalgam of a contaminated and hybrid reality, in which a hierarchy between expressive means and between locations for the emission of discourses no longer made any sense. It is from this second perspective that various members of the supranational movement Fluxus (Nan June Paik, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, La Monte Young) staged sound events in the 1960s that went against the conventions of the field of music, even though they were supposedly working within this medium. These were events that twined together noises deliberately made and other random ones that had been collected without any conceptual distinctions, besides bringing elements normally associated with the field of the visible to the world of sound. It was also within this expanded field of perception that—from the 1960s onward—the installations of the North American artist Max Neuhaus found a place. In these works, Neuhaus suggests that the temporal nature of sound is capable of redefining the way in which a particular space is understood, indicating the impossibility of confining knowledge to a single investigative dimension.

This impure tradition, characterised by the bringing together of the seen and the heard, grew in substance, in the following decades, in various parts of the world, and came to inform the work of many so-called visual artists, including Bernhard Leitner, Bill Fontana, Steve Roden, Stephen Vitiello and Christian Marclay. It was also taken up, from the 1980s onwards, by rock groups and electronic musicians, such as Sonic Youth and LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator). It was under the influence and the aegis of this formless background that the Brazilian collective Chelpa Ferro was founded in 1995. The group bears the stamp of a variety of local influences—from the trio elétricos of Bahia to the Belém aparelhagem raves, from performances by marginal poets to the work of Hélio Oiticica and Cildo Meireles—in addition to a musical appetite large enough to embrace Stockhausen along with the Sex Pistols, the Aphex Twins and the Velvet Underground.

Chelpa Ferro is made up of Barrão, Luiz Zerbini and Sergio Mekler, all of whom live in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The group is not, however, simply a sum of its parts, as each of its members bring from their solo artistic careers—beginning in the 1980s—the idea of combining pieces from various localities using the most diverse possible media. Barrão constructs objects out of the parts and leftovers of things that already exist, be they domestic appliances, as at the beginning of his career, or shards of china crockery, in more recent years. Luiz Zerbini, in turn, produces paintings that bring together different traditions from the medium of expression in which he moves, thereby approximating the representation of something to that which has yet to be created. Finally, Sergio Mekler edits and mounts filmed images in a necessarily singular fashion, when there could be many different ways of putting them together. Although the work of each member is distinct from that of the others, all display a certain coherence that is necessarily arbitrary and provisional, thereby signaling the impermanence of the relation between things and ideas. It is precisely this interest in the imprecise and transitory that these artists share most in common and which best defines their work as a group, which brings together and displays, in various formats—objects, installations, performances, stage presentations and records—sounds and images deriving from the experience of urban life in the contemporary world. This interest in the ambiguous and fleeting is already present in the very name of the group, which is a combination of an old and rare Portuguese word for money—the universal means of exchange—and the name of a metal that changes its appearance with the passage of time.

Listening degree zero

Despite the fact that it produces no sound whatsoever—or perhaps precisely because of the silence that envelops it—Moby Dick (2003) is one of the works of Chelpa Ferro that best sums up the way the attention of the group’s members is divided between the sounds and the images that surround them. In an exhibition room, the visitor is presented with a single enormous drum kit, replete with drums cymbals, pedals and a seat for a musician. The hyperbolic title of the work is a reference to the song of the same name recorded in 1969 by the rock band Led Zeppelin, in which the drummer, John Bonham, performs a lengthy and energetic solo. The absence of drumsticks, however, suggests that the drum kit is not supposed to be played: either by the members of Chelpa Ferro or by the public. This instrument that is capable of producing deafening sounds and a multitude of different timbres, of both enchanting and numbing the ear is here kept mute, offering itself solely for the scrutiny of the eye. The drum kit is presented here, in fact, merely as the potential for sound that the iconic appearance of the instrument summons up from the memory. Or as a noise that, inscribed in the memory of some form or other, may be recollected when contemplating an image.

Moby Dick thus brings about an inversion of the one-way relationship between the spheres of sound and image, which is common even among many of those who are conventionally referred to as sound artists. In this piece, instead of being a certain sound that suggests something fixed in the visual world, it is the silent and precise image of an object that acts on the sense of hearing. Such alteration of the perceptive process breaks down hierarchies commonly associated with synesthetic experiences, in which a particular image may correspond to a sound, but a noise may not be taken to be equivalent to a concrete image. This shift likewise appears in VU (2001), which comprises an analogical tape cassette recorder—connected to an electricity supply, but not to any amplifying equipment—in which the speed of the magnetic tape is slowed down as much as is mechanically possible, while the volume is turned up to the maximum the equipment allows. Apart from the visual counterpoint between the slowed down tape and the high audio volume measured by the pointers of the tape-recorder’s volume control (conventionally known by the abbreviation VU, standing for “volume unit”), there is a discrepancy between the image of the volume meter that suggests a lot of noise and the actual absence of sound.

The idea that images can activate the memory of sounds also informs other series of objects produced by Chelpa Ferro, in which translations between one field of perception and another (the auditory and the visual) are presented. Examples of these are Cup of water (2001) and Cyclotron (2001), in which low-pitched sound-waves, generated by frequency oscillators, are transmitted through loud speakers to cups of water and coffee placed on top of this equipment, thereby giving rise, through the slight vibrations in these containers, to a myriad of kinds of drawings on the surfaces of the liquids they contain. As in Moby Dick and VU, the perception of sound exists in these two works only by virtue of a sense stimulus offered to the eye. This investigation of silent listening to sound is extended to other senses in Bed (2001), in which people lie down, one at a time, on a structure similar to a hanging tatami mat, into which loud speakers have been inserted to fill the human body with various kinds of sound-waves generated by equipment similar to that used in Cup of water and Cyclotron. Although inaudible to the human ear, the low frequencies massage the muscles and, through this contact, it is possible to perceive the sounds being produced without the aid of hearing—and, in this case, without sight either.

Architecture and Noise

Although in many of Chelpa Ferro’s works the sound generated lies solely in the realm of thought or may even be only perceived by touch, in several others it obviously activates the organs of hearing. In many of these, the production of sound is caused by a bodily interaction between a human being and the objects or installations created by the group. Table football earth tremor (2006) is a case in point. In this piece, one is invited to take part in a game of football between the Brazilian and Argentinian national teams using a traditional table football game which is hooked up to various sound boxes that encircle the physical structure of the game. Depending on where the ball rolls and what it knocks up against, sensors connected to the table are activated, which, in turn, trigger a sampler containing pre-recorded sounds, which can be heard on the various loud speakers that amplify them. Chelpa Ferro thus add an element of sound to the visual and tactile involvement in the game and this sound originates in the movements the players make in their attempts to score a goal, thereby expanding the sensible space in which the game takes place, involving those participating—even if they are not actively partaking of the game—in a different kind of space. In Maracanã (2003), in turn, the visitor is confronted with a circular structure made up of huge sound boxes, all of them with their loud speakers turned towards the inside of the circle they form. One opening in this opaque circle and the continuous deep humming sound that emanates from inside invite those who are near the piece to enter the area marked out by the dark walls and reveal that all the sound boxes are connected to amplifiers of sound signals, although no prerecorded music or noise issues from them. The sounds of people walking about and talking inside this environment are, however, immediately transmitted back—modified somewhat and through the speakers themselves—to the people who generated them, revealing a circular system of capturing, processing and reverberating the noises that are produced inside. By perceiving the possibility of interaction with the work through sound, the visitor recognizes him- or herself as an active participant in the construction of a space that can be experimented with in innumerable ways, in same way crowds of football fans can turn a stadium, often irrespective of the quality of the game, into an arena of boredom or a place of ecstasy.

This concern with relating the symbolic architecture of a space to the more fluid realm of recorded sound is also present in diverse other works, even though these use different mechanisms to join together those spheres. One of the most eloquent of these in this respect is the installation Jungle jam (2006), which is made up of dozens of identical pieces, arranged in a horizontal line on the walls of a room and separated, one from another, by regular stretches of empty space. Each piece is made up of a small motor with an ordinary plastic bag pinned to its outer extremity. When turned on, the motors cause the pins to gyrate and with them the plastic bags, which slap against the walls producing syncopated sounds. The movements and the noises arising from them do not however follow a repeated or, inversely, a random pattern. The sovereign commanding voice in the piece comes, in fact, from the box lit by small lamps that is placed in one corner of the room, on which the unsightly mess of wires trailing from the motors and plastic bags converges. It is this box—which Chelpa Ferro call “bighead”—that controls the motors through extensive programming contained inside its cabinet, letting some run and others remain still at any given time. At one point, only those on one side of the room run simultaneously, the rest remaining motionless. At others, the motors are turned on in a linear sequence or in an alternating fashion, being immediately turned off again so as to frustrate any expectation of a progression. A little later they may all run in unison, as if they were a single unit. Like a conductor before an orchestra in which everyone plays the same instrument, the “bighead” cause some of them to play and others to fall silent at various times, creating out of a single element a variety of rhythms, timbres and sound textures.

Octopus (2006) is likewise an installation made up of various similar artifacts arranged in linear fashion along the walls of a room. However, although they all have the same function—they are eight sound boxes, each connected to a separate audio channel emitted from a single source of sound—differently from the pieces in Jungle jam their size and appearance varies. The sounds heard in both works are also of a different nature. While in Jungle Jam they are generated by mechanical movement in real time, in Octopus they depend on the emission of prerecorded sound signals. These are noises, chunks of music, sound effects and voices edited together into a sound-track lasting almost thirteen minutes and distributed, apparently erratically, among the eight channels. The editing takes each of them alternately or sets up temporary groupings of two or more, without making it possible to discern any particular order on a single hearing. At the same time as the fragments of sound-narrative presented ask whoever is present in the environment to complete it in their own imagination or, alternatively, to leave it unfinished, the constant variation of the source of the emission of the sounds shifts the attention of the ear from one part of the room to another. For reason of their apparent arbitrariness, these changes, in both Jungle jam and Octopus, are always unexpected and give rise to genuine surprise on the part of the person experiencing them. It is not, however, in the ear alone that each of these striking and recurrent alterations is registered. The eye, and with it the whole body, is able to identify, in an almost instinctive fashion, the various origins and the quality of the sounds being produced at any one time. As time passes, this interaction of the senses creates a new form of perception of the very spaces in which these pieces are installed, which cease to be mute environments and come to reverberate the sounds generated as if they truly belonged to them. There is thus in these pieces almost no distinction between the architecture of the places and the sounds that occupy and shape them; between the inhabited space and the temporality which bestows meaning on it, even though this significance is unstable and consequently subject to a sudden breakdown of their symbolic purpose.

Sound landscapes (from without and from within)

The temporal regularity that characterises many of Chelpa Ferro’s installations contrasts with the intermittent nature of the sound emitted by Nadabrahma (2003), a piece whose title comes from the vocabulary of Hindu spirituality and musical tradition and expresses the close association between sound and the divine. However, it is the striking visual presence of this installation that first assails the senses, because of the large number of branches with bean pods hanging from them fastened to the wall in a crooked line, each attached to a small motor, from which wires connect them to pedals placed on the floor. The silence in which this almost natural landscape is immersed is broken only by the free will of the visitors when they press the pedals offered them, thereby activating the motors for a while, and causing their vibrations to shake the branches that have remained motionless until that point. The shaking of the branches makes the seeds rattle against hard inner walls of their pods and echo throughout the exhibition hall at a brisk rhythm. As in Table football earth tremor and Maracanã, the voluntary action of the visitor brings together the visual and acoustic dimensions of the piece, thereby, as in Jungle Jam and Octopus, creating noises that redefine the meaning of the space in which the installation is contained. What is peculiar to Nadabrahma, however, is the fact that the sound it artificially generates is similar to that produced by the wind when it shakes trees in the outside world. It is almost as if there were complete contiguity between built and natural space, between the spontaneous movement of the wind and the forced mechanical movement. It is almost as if there were no more distinction as to the origin of all the noises that assail us in our experience of moving through the world.

The piece exhibited by Chelpa Ferro at the 51st Venice Bienale, Acqua falsa (2005), likewise brings together the sensory experience of being inside the exhibition space with what can be found if you walk outdoors. By flooding a whole rectangular room and allowing visitors to cross it only by way of a small bridge that divides it in half, the group makes an obvious allusion to the geography of this Italian city. It is the audiovisual structure installed here, however, that, in fact, identifies the work with the peculiar effect the city of Venice has on the senses. Scattered on the wall at one end of the room are small blue lamps that turn on and off alternately in blocs, apparently under the influence of some piece of equipment that, out of sight, opens and shuts the electric circuits at pre-adjusted intervals. From each of the lamps a thin black wire descends, and these, bound together within thicker cables subsequently pass under the water across the whole length of the room, under the bridge and emerge at the other end of the room where they are finally hooked up to a large sound box suspended by cables in such a way that the loud-speakers almost touch the surface of the water. The repeated crackling sounds amplified by the sound box and heard in the site are easily associated with the rhythmical changes in the configuration of the lights visible at the other end of the room and vice versa, suggesting to the visitors that these too originate in the pre-programmed electrical alterations. Finally, the close proximity between the loud-speakers and the liquid surface, which lies only a few centimeters beneath, causes the noises they emit to diffuse through the air and be reflected in the water before sending a low-pitched echo out through the whole exhibition space, giving them an acoustic quality that is contaminated by this contact. This is akin to the way image and sound are translated one into the other on the streets and canals of Venice, breaking down any hierarchy between the realms of the visible and the audible.

The way this work mimics something that appears to be external to it finds a parallel in Chelpa Ferro’s piece for the Eva Klabin Foundation, although, differently from Nadabrahma and Acqua falsa, the focus here is on the interior of a house. The foundation, set up in 1990 in Rio de Janeiro, is a house turned into a museum that contains the classical art collection that the collector whose name the museum bears built up over many years—mainly from the 1950s to the 1970s—apart from the original furniture of the residence and the antique personal items used by its patroness. As of 2004, the building has functioned as an art institution under the curatorship of the critic Marcio Doctors as part of the Respiration Project, whose aim is to stimulate contemporary artists to intervene in the domestic environments of the house and thereby create friction and juxtapositions with symbolic manifestations of the past. The disorderly arrangement of things in the world that Chelpa Ferro promote—be it by breaking down synesthetic hierarchies or by incorporating everyday noises into the sphere of culture—led them being invited to contribute to the space of the foundation as part of this project, and the result was the piece entitled Provisional stability (2005). As its title suggests, this work seeks to introduce the idea of impermanence into a place where everything appears to be already in its proper place, making use not so much of the vivid contrast between these different states (movement versus inertia) as of subtle feelings of sensorial animation to be experienced by the visitor. Faced with such serene and tidily arranged environments, belonging to a time that is no more, the group thus set up perceptual traps (involving sound or not) which are able to disrupt the placid appearance and bring the space into a present time which is open to what is still unknown.

In one of the house’s many rooms, Chelpa Ferro have, among other things, made the light vary regularly in intensity, amplified sounds of breaking objects and left a glass of beer on display, as if the place were still inhabited. In another room, they have made use of the various already existing references to music, filling the environment with the sound of needles scratching records and leaving around random written allusions to the sphere of sound. Apart from this, a vase placed perched on a table is constantly threatening to topple over—an image that presages din and disorder. Furthermore, they have mixed the objects that belong to the building with others that, once again, suggest the presence of a contemporary resident, such as cigarettes, drinks and medicines. In a third room, the most striking interference is brought about by small motors hidden under the main table that cause the whole surface of the table to vibrate along with the glasses, plates and cutlery arranged on it ready for dinner or supper, which crash against one another and proclaim existence as sound. In the garden, where the noises of the city are sufficiently loud to unsettle the house’s sense of being fixed in time, the recorded sounds of non-existent cars braking, alarms going off for no reason, and absent dogs barking can also be heard. Through these occasional interventions, the many inanimate objects in the former residence come to suggest to the visitor the emission of sounds that have become distanced through disuse from their existence as matter and form.

Bang! Crash! Clang! Smash! Pow! Boom!

The interest in listening to everything that surrounds everyday life, while refusing to follow the conventions that distinguish music from any other kind of noise, led Chelpa Ferro to turn a car into an instrument for the investigation of sound. They used a Maverick 1974, although it could have been any other make, old or new. They chose to do this not because of the sound of the motor, or the screeching of the horn, or the tick-tocking of the opening and closing of the doors, but simply because a car possesses, by virtue of the materials—metal, glass, fabric, rubber, plastic—of which it is composed, special acoustic qualities and a wide potential range of timbres, which are only brought out and heard together, however, when vehicles crash into rigid obstacles. As a way of emulating the sounds resulting from such circumstances without harming anyone, the group and a number of invited guests smashed up the Maverick to obtain the manifold sounds that the vehicle hides beneath the mute appearance that immobility imposes upon it. To do this, they armed themselves with a variety of tools, ranging from those which were readily to hand, such as hammers, lug wrenches and iron bars, to others prepared specially for the event, such as wooden or bronze drumsticks with their ends carved into the shape of busts of Beethoven, Mozart or Bach, as if to dismiss any doubts as to whether or not this piece did in fact aspire the status of music. Entitled Autobang (2002), this performance was presented at the opening of the 25th São Paulo Bienale.

After a cautious start to the simultaneous noise-making and destruction of the car, the Maverick-players gradually became more absorbed in their task of extracting the sounds they wanted to listen to by way of a growing number of hammerings, scratchings, making of holes and breaking of glass. The various sounds generated by this percussive orchestra were captured by microphones, manipulated using a computer, amplified and transmitted back to the audience. At the end of the programmed event, various members of the audience who had served merely as witnesses to this unearthly racket began to want to join in and continue the process, using the tools already scattered on the ground, or even their own bodies, by kicking and jumping on top of the car. The controlled action of the performance thus spilled over into something that could not have been predicted, and which could, therefore, in such a closely-packed environment have led to disaster. The anarchic polyphony that resulted from this breakdown of order thus translated into sounds, albeit with a degree of disorder that Chelpa Ferro could not have anticipated, the feelings that the people who participated in the activity (whether or not they were authorized to do so) carry around with them everywhere: feelings of desire and rage, fear and passion, lust and loss. Autobang thus amplified the strange noises that we all keep bottled up inside us.

The senses entangled

Chelpa Ferro do not aim to unify the senses with which we apprehend the world, thereby limiting themselves to suggesting the possibility of translating one into the other, without pre-established hierarchies and in an inevitably truncated manner. Instead of advocating expunging the differences between the faculties of sight and hearing, the group presents those who approach their work with a tangling of the senses. What they produce therefore belongs less to the soluble realm of digital technology and more to the field of dissimilarities marked by the analogical. An example of this is the installation On off poltergeist (2007), in which randomly selected television images are captured as they are seen together in the exhibition space and displayed on a series of old-fashioned monitors placed on tightly-packed packing cases, signaling the possible obsolescence to which they will soon be consigned. No sound, however, is heard through the audio-out channels of the televisions, as the loud-speakers have been taken out of the cabinets and placed together, with the aid of extension cables, in another part of the room. It is from this point that they transmit sounds across the whole environment without the necessary support of the scenes along with which they are launched on the air-waves, challenging the received idea that sound and image are one. Additionally, appliances connected to the televisions periodically turn the audio signals they pick up on and off, as if to confirm that the scenes shown do not depend on the sound specific to each in order to mean something. This is therefore a piece that materially breaks down the conventional one-way connection between what we see and what we hear, suggesting that the senses can be used in a different way. The opposite appears to occur in 100 metres shallow (2006), in which various video images are seen together in gradually changing combinations, always accompanied here, however, by the sounds that correspond to them: a woman washing her hair, a mixer producing cement, someone firing a revolver, a canary singing in a cage, or even the sounds made by objects invented by Chelpa Ferro themselves. However, although it is possible to identify image-sound pairs, seeing and hearing them together in this overlapping fashion eventually summons up involuntary connections between the perceptions of the different senses, thereby informing us that the phenomena found in the world intertwine in many and varied ways. Any rigid ordering of something seen and something heard is arbitrary and therefore exists only at the level of the transitory conventions that anchor life.

The tangling of the senses that permeates the work of the group finds its most refined expression, however, in the stage presentations they have mounted almost since the very start of their career, which show the influence that the world of rock and pop music has had on the members of the collective. Although the sound component of these shows obviously holds centre stage, there is in them, as in most of Chelpa Ferro’s work, a no less relevant visual dimension that manifests itself in distinct ways, beginning with the many images projected on screens during the presentations. In these projections, appropriate sequences of films and videos are added to others produced and edited in advance by the group itself, which highlight, exaggerate or contradict what is being heard live. However, there is also the projection of images created and produced in real time on the stage, which register, for a keen eye, details of the idiosyncratic attitude of the members of Chelpa Ferro as they invent sounds. This attitude allows them to play traditional instruments, such as drums, guitar and trumpet, at these events, despite having no musical training or perhaps precisely because they supposedly have no such training. What is at stake in their relation to these artifacts is, in every case, less the ability to reproduce techniques conventionally regarded as the correct way of playing them than the exploration of the broad range of possibilities for making sounds that they possess. This is a form of investigation that involves fragmentation, repetition, prolongation and other procedures for electronic recreation of the original registering of the sounds. The desire to bring to these presentations noises that do not lie within the usual boundaries of the world of music leads on to the creation of weird but witty new instruments, which also attract the attention of the eye: such as the tubular ashtray that is transformed into the body of some kind of cello, or the sewing machine and the fishing reel that makes a thread revolve and beat against the drum placed between the two objects. Eventually, it leads to the incorporation, as legitimate generators of sound elements, of things which, although they make noises, are always categorised as belonging to the silent world of forms. These may include a table football set used to play on the stage, an orange-squeezer making juice, or even pop-corn seller’s cart heating the corn. Amplified, the banging, buzzing and popping these objects produce are combined with the sounds of the (conventional or invented) instruments being played and a long inventory of other prerecorded sounds which are presented to the audience as something that refuses to be labelled. Something that can be heard and seen with a similar interest and that can even, in some cases, be drank or eaten, such as the juice and the popcorn, which are handed out to those nearest the stage. It may also stimulate the nose, as in the case of the aroma that wafts from the dozens of burning sticks of incense placed on the various components of a silent drum kit.

Another indication of the sensation of ambiguous proximity that Chelpa Ferro foster in relation to the world of music are the two records they have released: Chelpa Ferro (1996) and Chelpa Ferro II (2004). Similar to their live performances, the tracks on these discs present a combination of noises that are not normally heard together, thereby offering the listener an unusual, if not unprecedented experience. These are compositions that result from the openness of the members of the group to the continuous field of sound that exists in the world, absorbing and transforming anything that catches their attention and, often, that does not fit into the conventional category of music. These are mixtures of acoustic and electronic recordings, organic and electrical sounds, either ready-made or the fruits of the group’s own invention, constantly alluding to a multidimensional life-space that it is impossible to be grasped through a fragmented understanding of what happens in everyday life. The variations in timbre, rhythm and mood on each track of the discs—which oscillate permanently between sound structures recognised by the hegemonic culture as music or noise—is a measure of Chelpa Ferro’s ambitious programme of promoting an ambiguous sensory environment that eludes the deeply embedded codes that define which sounds are significant, and, consequently, which are worth listening to. It is this questioning of the boundaries of the restrictive sound-world that turns the group’s recordings into platforms that spill over into other senses, activating the visual memory and thereby invoking the faculty of sight. The fact that, different from their stage performances, there is nothing to be seen on the discs, does not mean, however, that listening to them is restricted to the world of the ear. They amount, as Chelpa Ferro themselves like to remind us, to “cinema for the blind.” And to an eloquent summing-up of the group’s constant efforts to give ear to the noise made by the world.

Moacir dos Anjos

Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat. A History of Sound in the Arts. London: The MIT Press, 1999.
Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noise (futurist manifesto, 1913). New York: Something Else Press, 1967.
LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise. Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Continuum, 2006.
Cox, Christoph. “Return to Form”. Artforum, November 2003.
For an overview of the relation between music and the visual arts in contemporary Brazilian culture, see Navas, Adolfo Montejo. “Plástica Sonora (Brasilis)”. Lápiz n. 201, 2004.
From the start of the group until 2003, Chelpa Ferro had a fourth member, the music producer Chico Neves, who also contributed his own particular professional skills to the group’s bringing together of disparate symbolic elements.
On first contact with Moby Dick, the installation seems to evoke, in a distinct field of symbolic circulation, John Cage’s composition, 4’33”(1952). The musician who interprets this piece remains silent and motionless by his or her instrument for the length of time given in the title. This makes the background noises present at the times and places where the piece is performed the mutable content of the composition. In Chelpa Ferro’s work, however, what brings sound to the piece is not what is happening around the piece, but what is summoned up by the memory. To those closer to the output of the group, the memory which comes most readily to mind is that of the performance Batteries (2005), in which, almost like Moby Dick in reverse, a dozen drum kits are played simultaneously for thirty minutes.
Cox, Christoph. “Lost in Translation”. Artforum, October 2005
This circularity of capturing and emitting sounds is evident in many other works by Chelpa Ferro. In Paraíba (1997), the singing of parakeets in a cage is captured by microphones installed nearby, transformed electronically and transmitted back, amplified, to the same place, giving rise to another cycle. Both in this work and in Maracanã, however, the circuits created are not closed, opening themselves constantly to new noises emitted by people or parakeets that are added to those that are already circulating in the works.
This feature forms a link between these and other works by Chelpa Ferro and those of Max Neuhaus, for whom sounds allow time and space to amalgamate in such a way as to render them indistinguishable. For a succinct introduction to the work of this North American artist, see LaBelle, Brandon. Op. cit.
Visconti, Jacopo Crivelli. “A impossibilidade do som”. [The impossibility of sound] In Alfons Hug & Ana Magalhães (Eds). Pavilhão do Brasil – 51ª Bienal deVeneza. Caio Reiswitz – Chelpa Ferro. [Brazilian Pavilion—the 51st Venice Bienale. Caio Reiswitz—Chelpa Ferro] São Paulo: São Paulo Bienale Foundation, 2005.
Cox, Christoph. “Lost in Translation”. Op. cit.
It is in the stage performances that the external influences on Chelpa Ferro are most in evidence. These include, in addition to those already mentioned, the iconoclastic Brazilian musician and performance artist, Hermeto Pascoal, the noise experimentation of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music album and the humorous sound-making objects produced by the half Swiss, half Brazilian artist Walter Smetak from the 1960s onwards.

O grupo Chelpa Ferro tem se destacado nos últimos anos por instalações sonoras extraordinárias, nas quais, a par de instrumentos musicais convencionais, são empregados materiais os mais originais: cinzeiros cantantes, máquinas de amolar facas, máquinas de costuras, aparelhos domésticos de todo tipo, até mesmo alto-falantes dentro de um aquário.

Chelpa Ferro, que significa “dinheiro” na antiga linguagem coloquial portuguesa, ama a aura de objetos achados comuns, especialmente quando sons podem ser arrancados deles. Uma broca enferrujada no consultório de um dentista soa como uma amostra de techno eletrônico; de galhos que são sacudidos por motores em miniatura sai o sussurro misterioso da floresta. Ou é talvez um concerto de música experimental? Um grande arco metafórico se retesa, indo de um simples pedaço de lata ou madeira até a obra de arte, poeticamente carregada. Ninguém, exceto Chelpa Ferro, sabe como soou a flauta de osso de cisne, que foi descoberta há pouco tempo por arqueólogos no sul da Alemanha e é, com seus 35 mil anos, o instrumento musical mais antigo do mundo.

Como curadores de um museu organográfico, que não por acaso está situado nos trópicos, Chelpa Ferro revolve nas minas da história e da atualidade da arte e da música. Ora o grupo leva a público um gramofone ou uma flauta de argila, com que os índios do Amazonas imitam o canto de um pássaro durante a caça, ora produz ruídos de uma turbina de avião, de uma sirene de alarme ou o som de uma ravetechno. Cores sonoras escuras e campestres e os barulhos frenéticos da grande cidade se revezam abruptamente. Entende-se por si mesmo que ritmos de percussão, derivados da música popular brasileira, surjam repetidas vezes.A imoderação da natureza tropical e a força de imaginação da arte estão unidas de modo feliz em Chelpa Ferro. Amiúde se trata de situações soando absurdas, que começam deixando perplexo o visitante para depois, dada sua fina ironia, devolvê-lo ao dia-a-dia com um leve sorriso nos lábios.

Além disso, os sons estão em um diálogo constante com o emaranhado de cabos elétricos, que acrescenta às instalações sonoras de Chelpa Ferro a dimensão de um desenho complexo. São laços negros e suaves que se refestelam lascivos pelo chão ou novelos confusos e grosseiros, tão pouco desenredáveis como as disposições sonoras. Desenho e composição são igualmente fragmentários e nervosos. O que de início parece provisório e frágil possui uma força e uma robustez intrínseca. Aos acessos de fúria se seguem momentos de alegre elegância. Ora o elemento de desenho e escultura tem supremacia, ora o elemento sonoro. E, eventualmente, os arranjos levam àquele ponto misterioso em que os sons se extinguem, transitando imperceptivelmente para o campo das imagens.

Alfons Hug

The old black-and-white photograph is rather blurry. Amid the smoke, one may identify some bicycle wheels, a plastic ball and some pieces of iron holding the suicidal machine together precariously. In another photo, between one cloud and another, one may make out the spectators, standing and attentive yet astonished, covered in winter coats; above and behind them some lit windows, but no one is watching from them. The accounts mention a 27-minute roar, the piano that seemed to have gone wild playing its own funeral march while the whole machine loudly collapsed, one piece at a time, to the ground. Staged in the gardens of the Museum of Modern Art, Jean Tinguely’s celebrated Homage to New York (1960) was at the same time a concert, a performance and a work of art, whose lucky spectators had the right, once the smoke dissipated, to walk up to it and take a piece to bring away.
As in many of Tinguely’s artworks, in Homage the sculptural and sonorous elements are blended into one, each playing an equally important part. The immediate consequence of this audio-visual equivalence is that the sound element must be assessed in accordance to new parameters, totally independent of the conventional ones: the sound of the piano, here, has the same value as the old, rusty bicycle wheel that comes loose and falls from a four-meter height. This democratization of sound is, at the same time, a fundamental element of Tinguely’s work and a revolutionary act: his sound sculptures testify to a new regime of noise in contemporary art, just as Duchamp’s use of common objects sanctioned their pertinence in the artistic context.
Chelpa Ferro’s “sound machines” are direct descendants of Tinguely’s sculptures (or instruments), and are reminiscent of them in various aspects, in particular for the simplicity of the materials used: banal, anonymous, exclusively functional objects. They simply lack any attribute or particularity – a chair, a motor, a plastic bag… In a text written a few years ago, Werner Spies outlined a fascinating parallel between Duchamp’s ready-mades and the procedure of appropriation and “ennobling” of banal objects by Don Quixote, as in the famous episode of Mambrino’s Helmet, where the ingenioso hidalgo mistakes a barber’s basin for the mythical helmet, not perceiving any rupture between reality and the mythical universe of his imagination. Chelpa Ferro acts in an analogous manner: they appropriate insignificant objects from the real world and transfigures them, imparting to them a new meaning – depriving them of their original function (their only reason for existing, as we have seen, considering that they are always eminently functional objects), they transform them into the instruments of an imaginary orchestra. Devoid of any aesthetic personality, these objects converge with extraordinary naturalness in the new context, lending a notable stylistic coherence to Chelpa Ferro’s corpus, which also includes sculptures, installations, performances, and even CDs. The fact that the objects used are devoid of any particular sign furthermore allows them to be considered as archetypes: the sound of a plastic bag turned by an engine (Jungle, 2001), for example, becomes the sound of “any” bag. In this manner, Chelpa Ferro’s artworks reeducate the observer/listener, revealing a melody hidden in the objects of everyday use, a sort of music of the world.
Particularly in the CDs, the sounds of everyday objects and situations (the sound of traffic and voices, for instance) give rise to surprising rhythms: just as what happens with the appropriated objects in the installations, the registered sounds are only fragments, elements extracted from the primary context and essentially re-created. The technique of sampling – the postmodern version of the pastiche dear to poets like Pound and Eliot – is Chelpa Ferro’s modus operandi, both in practical as well as conceptual terms. The choice of creating works made of pure sound demonstrates, moreover, that it is considered an authentic artistic raw material (almost like colors for the painter) and not simply an attribute of the work: an approach similar to other contemporary artists, as for instance Max Neuhaus. One of Neuhaus’s most famous works, Times Square, is a purely sonorous installation located in the pedestrian triangle formed by the intersection of Broadway and 7th Avenue, near 46 Street, in New York. Totally incongruous within that context (it consists of a continuous sound, similar to the echo of bells almost lost in the distance, which emerges from the sidewalk through a grille), Times Square bears no identification, and was conceived precisely to meld within the chaos of the area, full of infinite stimuli, both visual and sonorous. According to the artist, “for those who find and accept the sound’s impossibility, the island becomes a different place”; Chelpa Ferro also creates impossible sounds, whose impossibility resides, however, in the paradox of recognizing them as actual sounds, and not as simple background noise.

The mention of Neuhaus’s work allows for another consideration, also valid for many of Chelpa Ferro’s works: once the process is started, the artist doesn’t intervene anymore, doesn’t desire to control the development of work: at most, the artist just watches. The sound that emerges from the Manhattan sidewalk is blended – depending on the hour and an infinite number of unpredictable variables – with an ever different set of sounds, each time forming unique “chords,” totally out of the artist’s control. Chelpa Ferro’s Maracanã (2003), a circular environment formed by a series of huge loudspeakers, where the audience may enter and, while talking, hear their own voice repeated and distorted, obeys the same principle. Once conceived and put into motion, the work lives its own life, interacting in an autonomous way with the sounds of the viewers and the surroundings. Chelpa Ferro’s strategy is less akin to the recurrent attempts throughout the 20th century to interact with machines, or to totally delegate them to the creation of visual, musical or literary works of art, and nearer to those of contemporary artists like Christian Marclay, who, in 1985, launched a CD tautologically entitled Record without a Cover, which was sold without any cover – the inevitable scratches produced on them during transportation to the stores being considered an integral part of the work. So the CD became (as in Chelpa Ferro’s works) a kind of a receiver, an instrument capable of channeling and reproducing the energy of its surroundings. In recent years there has been a trend in various disciplines – primarily design – for creating works that are completed or come alive only through contact with their setting and their viewers. In the visual arts there is practically – at least in Brazil – an authentic, albeit incipient, movement characterized not only by the need of participation by external agents to complete the work, but also by the rudimentariness of the materials used and their artisanal, though extremely painstaking fabrication.

In spite of the almost impoverished simplicity of the assemblages, all Chelpa Ferro’s works possess an enormous artistic strength, in which one can recognize the weight of the private experiences of the various components of the group: Luiz Zerbini, painter; Barrão, sculptor; and Sergio Mekler, image editor. Most specifically, Barrão’s ironic and poetic sculptures, like the modified household appliances from the early 1990s, constitute a clear reference, an important precedent in the creation of a style particular to Chelpa Ferro. However, their sonorous purpose lends the group’s works an unmistakable character that also mitigates the almost surrealistic character springing from their being “beautiful like the fortuitous encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella” or – which is almost the same thing – like the encounter of a frequency oscillator and a vessel filled with coffee (Ciclotron, 2001). The evidence of their functions makes these improbable combinations perfectly plausible: they obey, so to speak, an iron logic of sound. The group’s name itself is an assemblage which is, at first sight, strident – a sort of oxymoron that juxtaposes chelpa (a Portuguese colloquial term for money) with a common and base metal like ferro (iron); nevertheless, it’s a perfectly coherent name, since it’s exactly from the union of simple elements, devoid of any value and apparently incongruent, that Chelpa Ferro extracts extremely fascinating, extraordinary elegant sounds and installations, transforming them, like King Midas, into gold.
An apparently paradoxical result of their great artistic strength is that, even though they were conceived mainly as eccentric musical instruments, almost all Chelpa Ferro’s works could function simply as sculptures, without any sonorous counterpoint. This is the case, for instance, with the large installation Nadabrahma, already exhibited at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna (2003) and at the last Bienal de São Paulo (2004): small motors attached to large, dried-out pau-negro tree branches are set into motion by the public, shaking the branches and filling the setting with the dry sound of the seed pods, as if the wind were suddenly blowing in the big white cube. It is evident that the installation’s strength derives mostly from the sound of the shaking branches, but the work’s artistic impact would remain great even if observed through sound-proof glass or, more simply, as a reproduction in a catalogue. The installation Moby Dick (2003), consisting of an enormous set of drums, replete with cymbals, kettledrums, bass drums, snare drums, etc., works in an opposite manner: despite that everything in it leads you immediately to think of sound, to the point of almost hearing it, it is exhibited in the strictly conventional museological manner: it is forbidden to approach and touch it. Silence is part of this work precisely as sound is an integral part of others: paradoxically, the objects that are most clearly connected to the production of sound are those that need it less, and abolish it.
All in all, Chelpa Ferro’s works function in parallel and simultaneously on two distinct tracks: the visual and the sonorous. In some cases, both tracks are superimposed, but an equally interesting effect is obtained when one of the two refers explicitly to the other, in its absence: silent objects transform themselves into bearers of sound, and sound becomes a creator of image.

She was false as water
Shakespeare, Othello

Walking along the narrow Venetian streets on his way to the pavilion, during his visit in preparation for the showing of his installation at the 51st Biennale, every now and then Luiz Zerbini would stop to listen to the sounds of the environment around him: the rustling of pigeons, the sound of the gondolier’s oar entering the water, the wind moving the leaves of the trees in the small half-hidden gardens on the banks of the canals; but also the incessant clicking of the Japanese cameras, the hollow sound of the luggage wheels over the sanpietrini paving stones, the echo of hurried boot heels over the wooden walkways, which were prepared anticipating the acqua alta [high water] that never came. Once in a while, when the sound was particularly interesting, he would take out his video camera and film it, almost confirming, definitively, the equivalence of sound and image in Chelpa Ferro’s synesthetic universe.

The installation in the big room of the Brazilian pavilion in the Giardini is characterized by absolute simplicity, yet can be considered almost as a compendium of the group’s work up to today, for the way it condenses all of the most recurrent and stimulating themes in its production. In a clear allusion to the Venetian context, yet aesthetically and conceptually coherent with the group’s history, the room is flooded, transformed into a giant watery surface. Coming from the smaller room, the visitors enter through a simple wooden platform that occupies the central, islandlike part of the room, from which they can observe and hear the surroundings. On the back wall, on the left side of the room, a constellation of LED light sources, of constantly changing colors, are switched on and off, each obeying its own rhythm. From the lights, electric cables extend down, enter the water and cross the entire room, plainly seen on the bottom of the improvised lake, passing under the visitors’ feet to reemerge at the other end of the space, leading ultimately to an enormous black loudspeaker. Supported by various cables attached to the walls, this loudspeaker – suspended just a few centimeters above the water and directly facing it as though involved in an intimate conversation with it – emits an uninterrupted series of dry sounds which are the direct amplification of the clicks of the automatic switches on the other end of the room which rhythmically turn the lights on and off. The movement of the air due to the sound causes the water to vibrate, and the sound is propagated across the water’s surface in the direction of the spectator standing in the center of this stupefying sensory circle.
As they click on and off, the (invisible) switches create – at the same time – sound and image; the spectator sees the light turn on, and hears the sound that causes it (or that derives from it). It is possible, without much effort, to imagine the path of the sound, in the form of an impulse along the cables spread under the water, and to see it when it physically falls from the loudspeaker, like a stone, into the water. And the water – an eternal allegory of metamorphosis (or of deception, for the Moore of Venice) – favors this synesthetic banquet, reflecting and blending lights and sounds.

Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

Like all revolutionary gestures, not an isolated one: Tinguely’s machines belong to a historic moment of great experiments, as demonstrated by the almost contemporaneous experiences of Harry Bertoia, La Monte Young, Nam June Paik and others.
2 Werner Spies, Der Betrachter macht das Bild. Die Wirklichkeit der Dinge und die Phantome der Kunst: Cervantes und alle die anderen von Duchamp bis Beckett, in Frankfurter Allgemeine, 19.09.1998.
3 Conceived as a permanent installation, Times Square functioned uninterruptedly from 1977 to 1992, when it was suspended because of a lack of funds for its maintenance. Recently (2002), it was put back in working order, with the support of DIA Center for the Arts.
4 Excerpted from the artist’s note accompanying the project, italics mine.
5 Spanning the spectrum from the surrealistic automatic drawings, where the hand absorbed the vibration of trains or airplanes, and Tinguely’s Méta-mécaniques (1955), machines that autonomously created artistic-musical works, to Hans Magnus Enzesberger’s recent Poesieautomaten (2000), an automaton capable of producing poetry.
6 Significantly, similar researches have been undertaken, at the same time, in various parts of Brazil, for instance, in Rio de Janeiro, (besides Chelpa Ferro, by Eduardo Costa), Brasília (by Milton Marques), and São Paulo (by Paulo Nenflídio).
7 I cite Breton, who, in turn, cites Lautréamont…
8 As though to confirm analogous interests, in a recent interview, Christian Marclay stated: “j’ai l’habitude de prendre beaucoup de photographie d’expériences sonores très quotidiennes, comme pour les souligner.”
9 For an exhibition at MAM-Rio (Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro), in 1997, for example, Barrão conceived a mechanism that sucked the water from the nearby sea, circulated it through the museum, and then returned it to the sea, falling from a window.

Graças a sua própria definição, as artes visuais, mesmo em plena contemporaneidade, confiaram muito na arrogância do olho e se dedicaram exclusivamente a pensar a presença das imagens no corpo e nos poros da vida urbana, deixando de lado o som, a massa de ruídos naturais e gerados por meios eletromecânicos que nas últimas décadas tomou conta do cotidiano até por impregná-lo por completo. Mas então veio o rock e com eles os adolescentes, como o quarteto do Chelpa Ferro, que faziam vigília a espera dos discos do Cream, Zappa, Who e Hendrix, curtiam as capas “popistas” de Crumb, Warhol e Hamilton, e o psicodelismo do Dean e da Hipgnosis, e eventualmente estouravam as caixas e amplificadores nos porões e garagens com os sons distorcidos de seus instrumentos. A parte isso, a porta da indústria cultural, ao contrário da alienação, também dava para a música eletrônica de Stockhausen e Henry, além do lance de dados de Cage e seu precursor, Varése.

Chelpa Ferro ataca a plasticidade do som em toda sua escala: batendo nas coisas, revelando a peculiaridade de seus timbres, constatando que tudo – das coisas da natureza aos objetos industriais – vibra em resposta a vibração do nosso próprio corpo. E vai ainda além disso, fabricando instalações e objetos sonoros, agindo como geradores de áudio, tratando de demonstrar que as coisas se relacionam entre si através de entrechoques contínuos, ressoando através de soluções que beiram a insolitude e o encantamento.

Este é o caso de “Hum”, instalação apresentada nessa Bienal: a pisada do espectador é quem aciona o pequeno motor que chacoalha os galhos e os frutos/vagens secos de uma árvore fixada na parede, despertando os grãos e fazendo-os soar como pingos de uma chuva lacônica que percorre o ar reverberando sobre as coisas, chocando-se sobre seu corpo até morrer nas covas dos seus ouvidos.

Prof. Dr. Agnaldo Farias
FAUUSP
Texto escrito para o catalogo da 26ª Bienal de São Paulo – 2004

O Chelpa Ferro oferece, aos nossos olhos e ouvidos, um amplo banquete sinestésico. Este banquete, caracterizado por obsessões tecnológicas e variações ritualísticas, pode ser saboreado de formas múltiplas e contrastantes.

Os devaneios técnicos levam o contemplador a um passeio por ruídos eletrônicos suspensos em sacos que desencadeiam zumbidos nervosos e intermitentes. Vendo e ouvindo esses aparelhos sentimos uma leve nostalgia dos ruídos do cotidiano.

Atravessando a intermitência das peças chegamos a uma misteriosa árvore eletrificada. Parece que Brahma permitiu que a sua voz ecoasse – sibilante – em 22 galhos com vagens de sementes; o que se escuta é um sussurro ritual, uma lembrança sonora de chuvas imemoriais. E os fios que amplificam essa poesia sussurrante aludem aos paus de chuva dos pajés da Amazônia. Galhos que ciciam, sussurram, rumorejam: a tecnologia induz ao transe das paisagens, ao rumor aliciante da voz divina.

Seduzido por essa mescla incomum, o humano tateia na direção de uma torre escura, de uma ilha cercada de som por todos os lados. Instalado no centro dessa arena ruidosa, percebe que está em uma câmara de zunidos, em um quarto de prazeres sonoros. Cercado por caixas de som, negras, densas, hipnóticas, ele experimenta a delícia incompatível da captação e da transmissão. Caverna curiosa que convida ao deleite amplificado, a torre escura zumbe, zune e com ela o humano que – como sempre – hesita.

“Hum! Parece que essas máquinas querem me dizer algo! ”, fala o passante intrigado diante do banquete oferecido. Entregue a uma volúpia contraditória – a do rito e a da técnica – ele bebe fascinado alguns goles de sinestesia.

Tateando através da multidão de hums, hums de prazer ou de surpresa, acaba encontrando cabos de som e de luz suspensos na parede. Compreende que se trata de uma homenagem, de uma despojada reverência à magia tecnológica. Cheio de curiosidade lúdica, avista depois um objeto conhecido: uma enorme bateria que não pode ser tocada, mas apenas contemplada. Divagante, sonha com Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Sepultura e desliza por uma espécie de rememoração heavy metal.

No final desse périplo misturado, contagiado por tanto ludismo barulhento, ele recebe as instruções: bem-vindos ao show sinestésico da vida, onde hums se multiplicam. Hums de humanos tontos de tatear tantas vezes e só encontrar as suas próprias invenções.

José Thomaz Brum

Texto escrito para a exposição “HUM “ no Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro – outubro de 2003

José Thomaz Brum é doutor em Filosofia pela Universidade de Nice e professor de Estética no Curso de Especialização em História da Arte da PUC – RJ.

An innovative experiment, the Respiration Project contrasts the enshrined art of the past with the contemporary art of today, within the same setting. This is intended to replicate the strategy of collector Eva Klabin, whose home houses works from many different periods in the history of art, gathered from many different latitudes. The apparent homogeneity conferred on the ambience of the mansion-museum that was also the home of Eva Klabin by its décor and acknowledgment of the history of art is shattered by the sharp contrast between the art of today and the classic art produced of the masters of the past, constituting the key character of this project.

The proposal of the Chelpa Ferro Group is closely aligned with the thoughts of the Curator. Provisional Stability is a quasi-illustration of this idea. The established, the enshrined, wither away before the playful. The disarray generated within such a tightly-structured context  where the history of art had the function of creating stable setting for the life of Eva Klabin  unleashes a stability (if only fleeting) that serves the purpose of questioning us about the place of things. Here, uncertainty becomes an open-ended value: the same value that has long guided actions in our society. Each moment, all the time, everything may change: due to violence, accident, or the speed with which information anticipates a future situation — through fear  or through the increasingly forceful actions of Nature triggered by the environmental imbalances caused by human beings. In fact, the quest for stability / instability that denounces the precarious situation where we are living right on the edge is the main triumph of the Chelpa Ferro installation. It finds the perfect setting in the mansion-museum that was once the home of Eva Klabin, revealing through contrast the discomfort and uncertainty of this precarious and transitory situation.

Marcio Doctors
Curator

the beginning was the sound of the shifty word propagating the second time of chaos/ what was, arose from the big-bang/ in the beginning was the shifty word propagating the second time of chaos/ if there is background radiation/ a luminous primordial echo serving for the measurement of the universal age/ there also exists a noisy echo framing that radiation – a background noise of the big bang/ if there are games of atomic mutation there are hidden frequency shortcuts in the vision/ hidden frequency shortcuts in the hearing scattered around there working with the nitty-gritty of the audio visual oral/ sound-creating offer/ animating the inanimate/interference in speech/ the/ digital built-in/ sound-creating material/ speech apparatus camouflaged in utility/ apparatus/ equipment/ object/ flesh/ everything distorted by the fugitive sound/ sound built into the ashtray/ speech fire/ a sonoplastic pyre/ a scream kidnapped by the lighter/ amplified by the distortion/the sound of politics/ the sound of sports/ the sound of sex/ the sound of weapons/ the sound of clouds/ the sound of the functioning liver/ of the functioning eyes/ of functioning urethras/ the sound of the orgasm/ of fighting among the crowd/ the sound captured and amplified/ distorted in the industrial machines/ the sound of eagles in a predatory dive/ if there exists background radiation there also exists a noisy echo framing that radiation/a sound-creating remnant in all bodies and objects/ improvised stethoscopes/ coupled to micro-cameras/ recording/ capturing/ distorting sampling the sounds inside the stone/ mineral/ vegetal/ atmospheric animal/ atmospheric animal growling in the loudspeaker/ ventriloquist mediumship/ the sound of hate/ the sound of love/ the sound of the perplexed open mouth/ the sound of the breathing plexus/ transferred/ placing an image of the turtle whose shell receives rain made especially for it/ accompanying it/ a lorenzetti showerhead raining down on the turtle which gains breath/ a sound of breathing altered by buttons of apparatuses/ a turtle as an apparatus/everything has a superficial and hidden sound/ and the basis of this hidden sound is the noise of the micro-second at the moment of the big bang/ they say that there was no sound produced in space but they discovered a noise in the first spark/ present in everything/ a fugitive sound/ background radiation/the sound of war/ the sound of births/ the sound of surgery/ the sound of lightweight devices/ the sound of the badly made synapse/ of the nervous stimulus in the neurological exam/ a tomography superimposed on the sound of magnetic resonance/ the sound of the heart outside the body in the hand of the assassin/ the sound of the inhumane/the sound in the popular music song/ radar interfering with the radio/ wave atop wave/ broadband/ megahertz/ giga hertz/ modulated frequency/ low/ high/ built-in atmospheric noise/ what sound does the digitalized landscape make?/ in the beginning was the sound of the word propagating the second time of chaos/ priorly primordial/ now sequential/ a cosmic groove/if there are games of atomic mutation there are territories of hidden sound/ landscapes of hidden vision that should be excited by the synesthesia brought on by uneasy jerry rigging/ the apparatus as a habitat/ serra mater piledriver/ what’s going on in the sonar?/ a yelled consonant/ a vowel murmured on the radio/ a noise of a scratching rough draft/ a sound of a jukebox playing music backwards/ it plays broken music/ stretched/ distorted musicapparatuses as a habitat/ stressful diversions/ prayer of the fugitive beat/ timbre of a scratch leaking/ voltage/ amperage/ garden of valve amplifiers/ an electron-tube garden/ mp3 in the ovary/ piledriver in the basement/ short waves/ average waves/ interferences/ ghosts on the old tv/ electron tubes/ sound plays, provoking the notes/ sound provokes imagination/ mathematics of the notes giving rise to feelings/ distortions generating a nervous sensation that reinvigorates something in the mind/instruments/ violin/ physics of the violin/ fugitive sound/ a riff in vivace/ a riff in andante/ a riff in allegro/ provocative paganini/ a nervous sensation generated by the violin’s acoustic properties/ an old vibration/ stradivarius/ Einstein playing with Max Planck/ vibration of the bow/ paganini
a rubbed string/ intensity in the tuning/ fingering the totem/ the golden ratio/ four coupled strings/ stradivarius/ fugitive sound in Paganini/ background radiation/ echo of the big bang vibrating shiftily in the violin/ sampling the vivace riff/ violin/ tuning pegs/ superior time/ magnetic pickups/ apparatuses with a habitat/fender stratocaster/ Gibson Les Paul/ tuning pegs/ thumbscrews/ fretboard nuts/ whammy bar/ scale/ selector switch/ bridge pins/ noisy habitat/ sequencers/ giant bass/ loudspeaker embedded in the vegetal/ the animal a selector of frequency of the wild sound/ bass and treble strings/ reverberation/ delay/ equalization/ pizzicato/ slap/ drums/ monument/ shaken totem/ ride cymbal/ tom tom/ bass drum/ floor tom/ snare drum/ crash cymbal/ chinese cymbal/ forest of trumpets/ an instrument glued on the household appliance generates a mobile piece of furniture with sounds of a cave inhabited by ceaselessly beating bat wings / bats flying nonstop full of amphetamines/ a locked-up batman / instruments/ piano/ arpeggiated chords/ rhythmed chords/ acoustic pedalings / electric piano / analog synthesizer/ mini-moog/ voltage-controlled oscillator/ voltage control filter/ midi in/ midi out/ keyboards/ organ/ four hundred tubes/ informal sound of urbanity/ instrument/ instrument components/ of the totems/ button petals/ inter pentium processor/ the studio as a bunker/ RAM memory/ quantum HD/ mouse/ motherboard/ recorder/ music on the monitor/ seeing music/ colored digital musical score/ the color of sound/ saxophone/ mouthpiece/ capo/ upper octave key/ horn bell/ key guard/ whistle of who was suddenly enlarged on the avenue/ blow job / cunt licking/ loudspeaker in the vagina/ blowjob on the headjob/ little reverberating baby’s mouth/ dadaista speech/ grunting/ a low yell/ bunches of laptops in wi fi with pendrives full of sounds of instruments being taken apart/ instruments being mounted/ being coupled to household appliances/ to weapons/ to plumbing/ saxophones in autoramas/ instruments coupled to cars/ vehicles/ violoncellos on tractors/ violins on clotheslines / tubas floating at the beach/ acoustic guitars attached to trees/ keyboards ripped out of pianos and attached to corralled zebras/ monitors falling out of airplanes / monitors connected to computers by mile-long cables fall out of airplanes with tunes getting mixed / processors being played/ in the stratospheric programs/ guitars in the desert/ sand in the pickup/ wind of a sandstorm/ sound of everything recorded/ captured/ sampled/ noise/ thread-spinning fat/ festival of apparatuses/ habitat of the riffs/ cosmic groove / hidden frequency shortcut/ fugitive sound/ distorted/ tapestry of cords/ apparatuses as habitat–

Em 1993, o Chelpa Ferro realizou sua primeira apresentação ao vivo dentro do projeto CEP 20000, organizado pelo poeta Chacal. Interessado na expansão do universo sonoro-visual e na descoberta de maneiras diferentes de organizar suas improvisações, o grupo vem desenvolvendo sua linguagem. Em função da busca por “novos” sons e por possibilidades diferentes de orquestração e montagem, O Chelpa Ferro trabalha com a pesquisa de fontes sonoras acústicas e eletrônicas, com a construção de “máquinas e mecanismos sonoros”, e com a utilização, não-convencional, de instrumentos musicais tradicionais.

A isto se soma um diálogo, também ininterrupto, com o cinema, vídeo, teatro e a dança. Nas instalações/concertos o espaço de fronteira e interseção entre as informações visuais e sonoras é o lugar onde se constrói essa experiência com conceitos como textura, organização espacial, sobreposição, perspectiva, densidade, velocidade, repetição, fragmentação, etc. A proposição de um estado de curiosidade e disposição contemplativa para a escuta e a discussão das relações dos sons com o espaço são as idéias principais sobre as quais se apóiam os trabalhos do grupo.