Grabador Fantasma (Phantom Recorder)
2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
9:25 minutes
Adrían Balseca
The project Grabador Fantasma (Phantom Recorder) consists of a communally constructed technological device in Sarayaku ancestral territory. Adrian Balseca’s site-specific composition is an “ecología del paisaje sonoro”, an artifact that collects sounds produced by different organisms, amplifying the complex historical plot of the area. From a traditional Sarayaku Peracian Dacryodes Copal wood barge with a solar cell panel system, an electric motor, a gramophone, and a recording system wireless audio, the specific characteristics of the soundscape are registered and transformed. The project seeks to reveal the modulations of the landscape through the causes and effects of biological (biophonic), geophysical, and man-made (antropofonía) sounds. Recorded on film, the video is inspired by Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982), on the figure of businessman Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald who travelled to the Amazon with his gramophone to make his millions in rubber, aspiring also to build an opera house in the jungle. Balseca explores the colonial violence of which Fitzgerald is emblematic, here using the gramophone to pay close attention to nature. By deviating from a story where the main character is a European industrialist blinded by the promise of rubber and by the work within a territory that resists the oil industry, Balseca denounces a world founded upon extractivist modernity. In its acoustic dimension, the work is an invitation to re-politicize ecology and to rethink the concept of territory. The artist adopts the sound of listening, which, as a tool, a creative means, to orient us towards compassion and care.
Artist Adrian Balseca’s work broadly focuses upon extractivist practices in South America and across the globe, contemplating their ensuing environmental impacts. Producing installation, photographs and objects, the artist explores issues including the history of rubber extraction from the Amazon, the impact of oil spills, and the development of the car industry. His work tracks a trajectory through developmental history that allows for a reflection upon the physical, economic and epistemic violence contained within modes of production at the service of multinational capital. Often beginning with site-specific interventions based around banal yet symbolic objects, the car, a sewer, or a lamp for example, Balseca goes on to explore their manufacturing process, through which we might access questions of economy, nature, power and memory.
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