Claudia Pagès IN RESiDENCE at the School Jaume Balmes

Hi ha una paraula entre la silla y el salón

Hi ha una paraula entre la silla y el salón
Performative action
Stage design with written texts and podcasts of the programmes.

Description of the work
Hi ha una paraula entre la silla y el salón is a proposal that moves between the stage and the text, between the spoken word and the written word, between sound recording and live sound. It is made up of a series of four radio-programme podcasts based on interests, slogans and research on radio itself. It is also presented live, staged with unstable materials and texts written and gleaned from the street.

At the same time, all the files of text worked on are shown in the presentation, the sound recordings and some of the exercises performed are heard, such as the glasses engraved with typography and the container of words, made with clay.

Presentation
The exhibition was presented on Friday, 24 May at 7 pm at the Espai 2 in Galeria Àngels. Students at the presentation explained the work process carried out over the course of the year and read excerpts from the radio programmes they had created. Following this, the creator explained the experience.

The presentation was attended by friends, family members, teachers and representatives from the ICUB, the Education Consortium and people from the world of culture.

To introduce the exhibition and the work carried out over the course of the year, the students prepared a presentation text, quoted in full below:

“Good afternoon, everyone and many thanks for being here with us.

Allow us to introduce ourselves: we are a group of fourth-year compulsory secondary-education (ESO) students at the Institut Jaume Balmes, working together with Claudia Pagès, the artist who accompanied us this year in the “Creators in Residence” project. Today, we would like to present our project and show you the entire creative process behind our work, as we believe that it is also essential for understanding the final result.

Our first days with Claudia involved introducing ourselves and getting to know one another a little, finding out who Claudia was and what projects she had been working on.

One of the first activities we did with Claudia was to do an engraving on the glasses we have put on display today. These glasses helped us to create a climate of conversation, exchanging ideas far removed from a classroom atmosphere, simulating an informal situation like you get in a bar.

The first activity was creating a mobile called “The machine for connecting concepts”. Each student created a visual poem and then, between us, we gradually connected our visual poems and ended up creating a gigantic mobile.

A few weeks later, we went to visit the Ràdio Dublab centre in the Raval district, where we were told how the radio station was run and how its programmes are organised. That was where Claudia told us that the final project would be to create a radio programme in which each group would make its own audio.

Later on, we worked on representing the void following the Oteiza model. The knowledge we acquired helped us to create cubes that would represent fullness and emptiness. That activity is not shown here, but you will find full information on it on the course’s blog.

Once we were focused on the project idea, we began to familiarise ourselves with written and oral communication. By reading texts, spontaneously, we collected words at random that were used for creating poems.

Once we had begun mastering the world of the word, Claudia organised an interview with the writer Ferran Aisa, who had written the book ECN 1. Radio CNT-FAI Barcelona. La voz de la revolución. We put a series of questions to him which we had previously prepared in class. It was a very pleasant interview, during which we learnt a lot and he showed us a very extensive world on communication.

Finally, we focused on the panels, recordings and two containers accompanying two recordings, shown here today. Each group focused on one of the following issues: censorship, stereotypes, free women and free software.

Now, once the project had finished, we saw that Claudia's proposal had been realised. Proof of that is that we are all here today to show you the result of our radio-programme project.

We hope you like it and enjoy the exhibition.

We wish to express our gratitude first to Claudia, without whom the project would have been impossible. And our gratitude to the Galeria Àngels for lending us their venue today, as well as all the other people, associations and institutions that made this project possible!”