SONIC BODIESWith Teresa Arêde

Following a guided tour of Vera Mota’s exhibition Phantom limb sensation, the voice will be introduced as an extension of our own bodies. With artist Teresa Arêde, we find that the voice resides within the whole body, from internal utterances to fingertips, coming out inevitably through the larynx as expanded matter. What comes first? Gesture or sound? The voice is invisible yet present, sensorially undeniable, just like a phantom limb. With the various body parts we have at hand, blind sonic drawings will be created. With eyes shut, we will try to understand how sound takes its form, to then draw it as lines, stains, abstractions, and even cellular organisms that give actual life to graphic scores. In rearranging the body’s expressiveness, where the hand becomes the mouth or the voice embodies the hand that is missing, we shall materialize our presence beyond ourselves.

Teresa Arêde (Viseu, 1991) studied Fine Arts at the University of Porto and the Royal College of Art, and Classical Voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. In her work, she uses fiction as a tool to re-think the present times and combines elements from her musical studies with her artistic practice. From her artistic path highlights include: the group exhibition My witness is the empty sky (2022), Galeria Plato, Évora; the solo exhibition Boca de Cena (2021), at DENTRO, Porto; the sound work for the exhibition O Relato (2021), by Fernando José Pereira, for the Espregueira Mendes gallery; the collective exhibition London Grads Now (2020), at Saatchi Gallery, London and the virtual collective exhibition Tomorrow:London (2020) at the White Cube Gallery. She collaborates regularly with the educational services of A Oficina (CIAJG,CCVF,CDMG) Guimarães, and Centro de Arte da Oliva in S.João da Madeira. She develops voice and graphic music notation workshops for the contemporary dance course at Oficina 0 in Porto.