Mariela Limerutti Visual Artist, Argentina.


NEAR THE SEA

Guía de Isora, Tenerife, Canarian Islands, Spain
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NEAR THE SEA

This sound installation plays stories of people of the city of San Juan that is located in the mountain range of the Andes, Argentina, about their memories and experiences of the sea. A loudspeaker was installed exactly "near the sea" in the Beach of San Juan, Guía de Isora, Tenerife, Canaries Islands. Those who were listening to them, experienced, at the same moment, the vision of the sea, surely making many relations and contacts with those speeches that arrive from the distance. The voices spoke in Spanish but with a foreign accent, which implied an almost indecipherable geographic disctance.

The city of San Juan is about 600 kilometers away from the Chilean coast, crossing the mountain range; and more than 1.300 kilometers far away from the Argentinean coast. The interviewed people were all born in that place; mainly due to geographic conditions, they had not had an assiduous contact with the sea. In addition, the population of San Juan characterizes itself for being sedentary and not traveling so regularly for holidays. For these inhabitants, the idea of the sea sends them, almost always, to a memory of an experience in a quite far away past. The very few temporary contacts and the distance to the sea cause certain wonder in this circumstance and experience. Thus, the relation with the sea is overestimated and loaded with emotions.

The stories talked about ideas of those people about the sea, how it is, what calls their attention, how they see it, and feel it, etc.. Many of them described personal situations related to the sea, their experiences, illusions and frustrations. What the word Sea provoked in them…

The project had a double purpose: On one hand, to stimulate on the interviewed the memory of something with which they did not coexist, and that had surely been changing and loaded with subjectivities through the time. On the other hand, to install these programs at the beach of San Juan, Tenerife, for being listened to by people who at the same moment, were experiencing in situ the proximity to the sea and perhaps the experiences of those stories. Thus, it was sought to generate in the listeners, a more intense reading of the present moment. The visitors of the beach of Guía de Isora could surely establish many similarities and differences between the speeches about the sea that they listened to and their own experiences in that precise maritime place where they were.