Every year thousands of people try to cross the Mediterranean Sea from the African coast to Europe. In the summer of 2016, César Dezfuli spends three weeks on board the Iuventa, a former fishing boat operated by the German NGO Jugend Rettet, where he witnesses the rescue vessel assist people risking their lives on the central Mediterranean migration route, the overseas crossing from Libya to Italy.

The desire to document the reality of migration, to reclaim identities that remain invisible behind the statistics, leads Dezfuli to a second stage: the stories of the protagonists of the project must be told. He undertakes a search for the 118 passengers to find out why they left their countries, what they experienced on the migration route, and how they continued their lives after being rescued at sea.

AIYÉNIARIWO is a 60-minute documentary sound art work Designed for small movie theaters. There’s no image in this documentary, so is a pure sound landscapes experience. The work is divided into 4 acts, where the sounds of human beings and nature are delocalized and transformed to let the narration make sense from a purely sensory point of view.

AIYÉNIARIWO refers to the sound concept within the African mystical tradition, specifically in the Yoruba of Nigeria. A few years ago I was studying these concepts before going to Cameroon to record the sounds of the Baka pygmies, specifically as in African traditions the word “sound” was described as a vehicle that allowed to articulate an abstract idea in a concrete way – for example, to communicate thought as if it were matter -. The sound also has a power of invocation that would allow to reach psychic powers of a brutal power.

The African tradition considers the sound in a much broader way than the superficial meaning given to this word. The Yoruba of Nigeria have surely been the ones who make the most references to the mysticism of sound in their legends, poems and proverbs. It is common to find in his verses how sound becomes matter and then vital essence. For example, references to the first birth of the sound of water, and after the water itself.

The title you see below is a compound word, which means “The earth is noisy (you can also say a clamor, or a noise).”

BIG DATA is a sound multi-installation, adapted to a public space and accompanied by a visual projection. The project refers to the etymology of the word that gives it a title (in English, “Big data”), in relation to an immense amount of information that a structured system would not be able to process and is forced to find repetitive patterns in the same to be able to analyze them.

The installation tries to establish a relationship between that system, in this case the human being, and the big data provided by the sound that surrounds us through a real and other virtual media. It is developed on 4 independent sound installations that interact with an open and public space; Each installation refers to a cardinal point (north, south, east and west) providing structured sound landscapes with samples recorded by the artist in different parts of the world and acting as virtual screens that would transport us to virtual environment, far from space real sound that houses the multi-installation, where we will find – consciously or unconsciously – those patterns that would somehow connect the real with the virtual.

BIG DATA also invites, with the support of the visual projection that accompanies the installation to reflect once more on the fact of a constant “virtualization” of human society, which seems to insist on a constant search for that virtus (in Latin , initial force or energy) that produces the effect, whose result does not allow us to meditate on the present and gradually disconnects us from nature and reality.

Sound Art piece for photographer Álvaro Laiz’s exhibition “Fosil”, at Steel & Mining Museum of Castill y León, Spain.

Fossil analyzes, documents and show the evolution of the decaying coal miners basins in northern Spain. Refers both to the fosilized minerals from the
Carboniferuous period and the fossilization process the mine industry is, paradoxically, experiencing.

Dolby Atmos Sound Art & Landscape design for Magnum Photographer Cristina de Middel for her project “This Is What Hatred Did”.

This is what hatred did is the lapidary phrase that ends Amos Tutuola’s novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. When it was published in 1954, the novel provoked such violent reactions that Tutuola was obliged to leave Nigeria. Its concluding phrase is the starting point for photographer Cristina de Middel‘s interpretation of the tenebrous story based in the streets of Makoko, a watery slum in the city of Lagos.

Multichannel Sound Landscape design for photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind, on the occasion of the Niemeyer Grand.

‘Stay’ is a series of video portraits of Ukrainian women in their homes after their husbands or sons have left to fight in the war.

Taylor-Lind travelled all over the country making portraits of women from both sides of the conflict who are waiting for their men to return. While these women sit quietly at their kitchen tables, or in their living rooms, their men are away fighting each other in the East. The videos are layered with a composition of everyday domestic ambient sounds and the sounds of the war as it manifests itself inside the home.

TÉRREA is a multichannel audiovisual installation based on an exhaustive exploration of the space we invaded, lived and traveled, but from a ground level point of view and, in synchrony, below it. The general idea starts from that “low” perspective, through the land we walk through – regardless of how we have covered it, be it asphalt, tile, wood or granite – whose “rhythm of routing” is determined by who we are, where we are and, most importantly, where we are going.