Disappearing, leaving a trace, tracking and linking stories to construct a tale, sometimes a vital one… All these concepts are not foreign to Lúa Coderch’s practice, a work that is anchored in reality and memory and that stands out for its rigor, precision, depth and for being subtly playful and subversive.
Drifts and storytelling are an essential part of her work. The concatenation of ideas, facts, anecdotes and situations configure hypertexts and non-hierarchical paths, in the manner of drifts, in the course of which the story is constructed. This is the case of the video Oro (2014), a narration based on very diverse references and visual material, about how value and charisma are generated and their relationship with distance, opacity and appearance.
The first-person narrative is also common in her practice, as is the case of Night in a Remote Cabin Lit by a Kerosene Lamp (2015), a brief video correspondence between two people, whose leitmotiv is the construction of shelters in nature, although the precariousness of the structures makes them the starting point for thinking about our ways of living and relating to the world.
Nature, its exploration and, let’s say, deconstruction/reconstruction, reappears in Or, Life in the Woods (2012-2014) first and, more recently, in Treball de Camp (2015), a sound piece produced by Cal Cego in which the artist has travelled through the olive groves and the humble forest that surrounds it in the Penedés area, recording the sounds that build the idea of landscape. Thus, she selects sounds that the artist considers susceptible to being sung afterwards, such as birds, bees or the wind, while distinguishing others such as cars or planes. This approach turns the piece into an exercise in sound landscaping, not very different from what a landscaper might do using drawing. At this point, connections could begin to be made with the artist in Peter Greenaway’s film “The Draughtsman’s Contract” who was also commissioned to draw an everyday and domesticated landscape, a point at which the similarities with Lúa Coderch would end, since, unlike Mr. Neville, Coderch is not confronted with intrigues or plots. On the contrary, once the sound recording is finished, the artist undergoes a purely technical and laborious process, nothing spectacular (and for that very reason she prefers to keep unnoticed), consisting of dismantling the sounds one after another, slowing them down or speeding them up to bring them closer to the register of the human voice, then memorizing them, interpreting small fragments of sound, recording them and returning them to their original speed to gradually replace the natural sounds with their equivalent in the version, let’s say, sung. In short, to undergo laborious and precise work to produce an absolutely constructed soundscape that replaces the natural one in a believable way.
At the beginning of the text we spoke of a subversive and playful approach. Both aspects are very present in Treball de camp, although always preceded by the adverb subtly. Subtly is what makes it not obvious that the sounds we hear are not natural. Listening to the piece provokes certain moments of irritation, of having the feeling that something does not fit, of orchestrated or overly composed moments. Irritation or suspicion are precisely what reinforces attention and, with it, the need to investigate, to find out what exactly causes strangeness, to try to understand and discover the construction of the mechanism to think and ask ourselves questions, again, about the self and the landscape, which is the same as saying, about our relationship with the world.
