Daughter of a Voice is a public arts project located in the village of El Bruc, Catalonia, which undertook a re-activation of a discrete local legend of national significance. The legend of Le Timbaler del Bruc (The Drummer Boy on Bruc Hill) recounts the tale of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Catalonia in 1808, and of a young drummer boy from the village of El Bruc. It holds that upon seeing the approaching invaders, the boy drummed out a warning to the countryside only for the sound of the drums to echo tenfold in the mountains of Montserrat, as if they were the marching drums of a huge army, which led to the retreat of the French. This artistic research project engaged sculpture, text based artworks and performance, with the key elements of a sculptural intervention within sight of the monument to Le Timbaler. The project instrumentalised the phenomenon of the echo, deploying the echo as both event and a methodology to critical engage the repetitive actions of remembering and memorialisation.
The echo is an acoustic phenomenon of self-organisation, it cannot exist without the boundaries and walls that surround the void. It is these boundaries that determine the timbre, pitch and length of the echo, the void then being inhabited by the echo itself. The borders are organised into an auditory experience, and through a process of deterritorialisation, the voice-becomes mountain. Although the physicality of the envelope will contort, subvert and transform what is propagated, the echo requires and sustains the seed of what is inserted into the void.
The echo is a counter-monument, in that the monument is always-already in the past, and the event that the monument is a commemoration of precedes into the future from the actuality of the monument. The echo itself depends on the actuality of the monument, as an origination point from which the echo to occur and cannot itself be the monument. The echo itself can only take place and be experienced in the present, for the future echo that comes from any origin cannot occupy the same space-time as the origin itself. As a counter-monument it exists in the present but will itself disappear due to the entropy and decay inherent to an echo, and is an ephemeral thing of immateriality.
This artistic research project has been presented at the Irish Museum of Modern art in 2015, as part of the Art-Memory-Place program to coincide with the centenary of the Easter Rising. The project has also been presented in 2016 to the Sites of Memory in Contemporary Art Research Group at the University of Amsterdam.
