Pedro Magalhães + Ensemble Decadente

Performance, 40’

18 OCT, 19:45

Performance activation of Pedro Magalhães’ installation Hidden Track (graphic scores) by

Ensemble Decadente: Xavier Almeida; Íris Neves; Valley Rosário; Elisa Pône; Francisco Amorim; Kino Sousa; Tatá Garrucho; Carla Badillo Coronado; Francisco Vala; Miguel Ferreira

Pedro Magalhães

Hidden Track (graphic scores), 2021

18 OUT

Installation

4 guitar amplifiers, 20 HT music books, 20 music stands, sound, 40 min. (loop) 

Pedro Magalhães

Hidden Track (video-performance), 2021

19 OCT 

Video projection, 16:9, colour, sound, 20:23 min. (loop) 

Hidden Track is a project by Pedro Magalhães that explores the intersection and translation of different media, instigating sonic and visual experimentation as an act of resistance and poetic rebellion. This project unfolds over several moments through diverse media and materializes in multiple works. It has its genesis in a performance, passes through drawing, transforms into photographs that become graphic scores, giving rise to a musical piece that, in turn, fosters new performances.

The title, referring to hidden musical tracks that became popular on rock bandsʼ CD releases in the 1990s, also suggests the idea of a veiled message, concealed in the poetics of discourse, or encoded to avoid censorship. The work that originates the entire project (video performance) is likewise a hidden piece within the exhibition GIG! (ARTES, Porto, 2020).

After GIG! closed, in the space where the exhibition took place, the artist carried out a performance using a charred electric guitar to intervene on a white wall, creating a performative drawing in a progressive choreographic sequence that culminates in cathartic gestures of destruction of the gallery wall.

The electric guitar, as an icon representative of countercultural movements, agents of struggle and protest for social, political, and cultural change, is presented initially in the condition of an immobile and inaudible corpse. The artistʼs intervention makes it possible to re-signify the object and its symbolic charge, ultimately revealing the remaining potency of a body apparently devoid of qualities, and its capacity to remain active in expressing a discourse of resistance.

From the result of the performance, photographs were taken of fragments of the mural drawing, giving rise to a series of 108 images that are assumed as graphic scores for a musical composition for electric guitar(s). These scores, not obeying the restricted codes of any pre-conceived language, evoke, in their abstraction and in the varying tonalities, intensities, rhythms, and gestures, the sonic universe of noise/experimental musical composition. Their freedom of reading allows different interpretations of a work intended to be open to multiple approaches, contexts, and collaborations.

In this edition of The Museum as Performance the installation Hidden Track (graphic scores) is presented including the sound piece played through a set of guitar amplifiers, together with the score books displayed on music stands distributed throughout the exhibition space.

Responding to Pedro Magalhãesʼs challenge for a new interpretation of the scores, the Ensemble Decadente collective will present a multidisciplinary performance, an act of occupation and appropriation of both the Hidden Track work and the museum space.

Hidden Track is part of a universe of research into musical counterculture rituals as agents of social transformation. It explores the intersection and translation of different media, instigating sonic and visual experimentation as an act of resistance and poetic rebellion.