MURMURS II: Tres. Blackout #33, conducted by Arnau Horta 

Nearly ten years after Tres’ death and as part of the MACBA 30th anniversary Murmurs programme, the museum is to host Blackout #33, the first since the artist’s early demise in 2016. This will fulfil Tres’ old wish to switch off MACBA, to turn it into a place for shared silences and listenings. From 8:00 to 8:45 pm on 11 December, the museum will be open, but will be shut down. 

Tres (1956–2016) never ceased to explore, poetise and tell stories about, from and through silence, in his own words, “the loudest sound there is.” Following in the footsteps of John Cage, he realised that, even if it does not exist, silence could be listened to; must listen to it. This militant commitment to silence, with all its sonic ineffability and its metaphysical and political roundness, gave rise to a host of projects based on images, texts, objects and actions of different kinds. 

Among these were the Blackouts, initially entitled Conciertos para Apagar [Switch off Concerts], a series of performances in which Tres proceeded to silence the “sound waste” produced by all the technical systems and features that allow “an architectural site to work”. Through this gradual process of switching off and removing sound, the audience experiences a “sharpening of the hearing” as they take part in the collective creation of “a dense silence, made of many silences”. 

This action is part of Murmurs, a live arts programme running over twelve months to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the museum. The programme makes use of the poetry of the unfinished, undocumented or simply unmade to review key episodes in the recent past.

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participants

Arnau Horta

Tres

Barcelona, 1956