Sounds Like Isolation to Me

Sounds Like Isolation to Me is a museographic essay about the struggle between the social and political consciousness of the avant-garde and the autopoetic aura behind the idea of segregation as a fertile space for creativity. It also implicitly tells the story of breaking away from one life in order to reinvent oneself under new circumstances or perhaps the inability to perform such radical acts. In this undated artwork, García Torres detemporalizes his “essay,” thus removing it from the factual temporal-historic axis of his own investigation, placing it in a free-floating circulation of experience and practice. “Every work of art comes into the world not in order to replace something that already exists but to foreshadow, anticipate, and rehearse possibilities that are yet to be,” as Raqs Media Collective has written, paraphrasing the Mexican poet Octavio Paz.

In this multifaceted installation, García Torres charts the story of the composer Conlon Nancarrow. Born in the United States, Nancarrow immigrated to Mexico in 1940, fearing possible harassment by the US government because of his political affiliations as a member of the Communist Party. In exile, Nancarrow created an overwhelming musical repertoire, mostly in “temporal dissonance,” living in relative peer isolation, with little contact with other avant-garde musicians of the twentieth century. This story explores the isolated studio space and makes a case for the possibility of prolific creative output even when living in isolation, away from your supposed cosmos. The work consists of a number of objects, documents, and artworks as well as a sound component created by the Berlin-based composer Nils Frahm.

“This installation puts Nancarrow’s practice – read more broadly, from beyond the confines of just the music world – into perspective. It is composed of Nancarrow’s original papers and reproductions, as well as works by other artists that accompanied him, personally or remotely, in his practice. Rescuing tapes, tuning a piano, and writing and rewriting letters are among a number of other contemporary gestures that act as narrative joints that advance the missing links in this museographic essay”.

- Mario García Torres