2 channel audio 2020
Salvador, Brazil. First opened in 1912, the Mercado Modelo faces the Bay of Todos os Santos in the historical centre of Salvador. Now housing mainly vendors of clothing and curios for tourists, it was once a customs building for goods coming in via sea freight.
In the late twentieth century, fire destroyed the building and exposed the long-forgotten basement. When the building was reconstructed, the basement was opened to tourists, but later closed again due to flooding. The basement is below sea level and often floods, making it unpredictable, although there are concrete slabs for walking through the space.
There are many stories about what might have happened in that basement, now called a senzala (slave quarters). A popular story is that people who were to be sold as slaves would be ‘housed’ there on arrival in the Western world. It is said that regular flooding caused countless people to drown. Some historians reject this possibility completely.
What does one feel entering such a space? Spaces and places speak, but how can we decode the language? Listening with the entire body, I felt an overwhelming sense of presence at the Mercado Modelo. Was that presence real? Was I influenced by the stories I had heard about the space? Was it metaphysical? Or purely physical—low frequency vibrations from the movement of the surrounding sea?
To record the sound of an ‘empty’ space is never to record ‘nothing’, but rather to record the subtle vibrations of the limits of that space: a conspiring of the walls, the ceiling, the stagnant pools of water collected throughout, the air moving. The space vibrates with the memories of things that have happened there—good, bad, indifferent. And what are memories but versions of fact, stories about the real? Digitally analysing the recordings to extract and amplify normally inaudible resonant frequencies, I piece together an alternate reading of the space through its sonic materiality.
The recordings were made while on residency at Vila Sul, Goethe Institut Bahia in Salvador in 2020. The work was realised for the project Are You For Real? by IFA Germany and curated by Paula Nascimento, Yvette Mutumba and Julia Grosse.
