Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Back to Basics program / JUNE-JULY 2022
Tomás Franco
Brazil
tomasfranco.com.br
About
Tomás Franco is a sound designer/recordist and
experimental video artist based in São Paulo, Brazil,
graduated in Film Studies at the University of São Paulo. He
currently works mostly with sound for film and television.
Tomás does experiments with musical sound recordings,
specially interested in the language of noise, electroacustics,
soundscapes and the lo-fi aesthetics (that, also with video).
As a composer, he has made classical guitar pieces in
alternative tunings, film soundtracks, and collaborations with
other artists. One of the sound interactions he explores is the
noise-silence duality and the disrupting of stillness.
“Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no
silence that is not pregnant with sound” - John Cage.
The Library of Imagined Sounds
In The Library of Imagined Sounds, you are invited to add
sounds coming from your mind on a wall and also to share
the experience of imagining the sounds described by others.
There are no limits to imagined sounds: they can be tiny, huge,
absurd, connected to memory, or the subconsciousness.
Time, space, actions, texture, characters and sensations are
translated in a short text, and shared.
By imagining sounds, more and more ideas appeared
and became experiments. In The Whispering Gallery, the
participants are invited to whisper to a device, in a private
room, and their sound is reproduced in speakers hidden
in the woods. Sound is displaced and secrets revealed to/
through speaking trees. By walking around, it is possible to
choose a voice to listen to closer, or just to stay in the center,
surrounded by people in multiple languages telling personal
stories, confessing something, singing or reading.
In Birds of Paradise, the initial input was by the imagined
sound “the song of an extinct bird playing at a mausoleum”.
5 visual artists were then asked to draw 5 different birds,
to be displayed at the entrance of the woods at night, with
an overhead projector. The songs of these 5 species were
edited and played back in high volume from the woods, at a
distance. The images projected in a white sheet, moving with
the wind, made the experience a bit ghost-like. Just at the
end it’s revealed to the audience that the birds they heard
were extinct, when they get a paper that has the name of
the species and info about where and how they lived, next to
each drawing and year they were likely extinct.