BY AMAUTA GARCÍA

With Gean Moreno-  an artist who resides in Miami- we discussed and organized for four days the event that we entitled “Ellipses”, in which we played with the possibility of creating a moment of silence isolating the noise of three public plazas in the Historic Centre of the city. We brought together the people who wanted to participate and we made a circle around some microphones that were lying on the floor. When a colleague gave us the signal, we came closer to the center and our bodies covered the microphones. This way the sound that was registered was suffocated. At another signal, we went away from the microphones and the sound of the city was recorded. When we finished these actions in circle we gave away some CDs with a story we had recorded previously. Beyond the intervention itself, the most interesting thing was the polemic that Gean Moreno unleashed inside the seminar; he questioned the way we had worked for the previous interventions, having as a result a big event at the end of each workshop. With this he wondered where the piece of art was, if it was in the recording process, in the action itself or in the distribution. Gean suggested a piece that escaped the art world, which life didn’t finish the day of the event, and that we should play with the photos and video that registered it.

This discussion triggered different reactions among us, some in favor, some against, related to the recording of this action in photo and video. It was even discussed the importance of the quality of the recording of sound. Without agreeing a hundred percent, on December 12th “Ellipses“   was carried out. The sound engineer was delayed, and there were camera men and photographers there, so this caused a great tension, which increased even more when we had some technical problems due to the heat that also increased as time went by. This action that was supposed to be really simple turned out to be really tiring. During the discussion afterwards we clarified some mistakes related to the organization and we identified the importance of having a good registration for practical purposes for MM. This experience turned out to be an excuse for working on a later workshop at Radio UNAM.