S O M A
emanuel dimas de melo pimenta concert . movie
Amici della Spirale Moscufo, Abruzzo, Italy October 6, 7, 8 2023 direction Marco Rapattoni
cellebrating all the women of the world
to Patrícia de Herédia
Women are wonderful
beings. Love, affection, care, intelligence linked to existence,
to life, sensitivity, intuition, glamour, delicacy, everything
about women is enchantment.
The muses were all women. From them comes music, poetry and dreams.
They are the guardians of the fabulous Library of Alexandria,
from where the word museum was also born.
The words muse and woman in romanesque languages (mulher
in Portuguese, for example), share the same etymological origin
in the Indo-European *ma, which indicated the ideas of
"thought", "measure", "matter"
and also "creative energy", as is the case with motherhood,
for example.
In turn, the deepest Indo-European root of *ma indicates
the idea of limit and, with it, the perception of things. There
is no life without a membrane, just as there is no perception
of reality without a limit.
These are very ancient origins. Indo-European is a language group
that became extinct around twenty thousand years ago, in prehistoric
times, and which gave rise to Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.
When I read about violence against women in the newspapers, I
confess that I find it hard to recognize myself as human.
In 2019, Marianela Mirpuri, a dear friend of many years, told
me about her project for a city for women. It's called the HERA
Project. In fact,
the city is the idea of civilization, of civis, and the project
aims to operate on the feminine dimension, which is wonderful
and which constitutes us all, even men like me.
We are this mysterious and delicious cosmic palette of sensibilities
and intelligence.
Marianela Mirpuri invited me to create an Observatory
for the Future of Humanity
as part of the HERA Project, sponsored by the city of Cascais in Portugal,
through its headquarters in an emblematic building. And so it
was done.
We have held various events, concerts, meetings and books as
part of the Observatory's activities. The AIW online
television channel
is one example - which in September 2023 had over a thousand
pieces of content representing around two months of viewing in
eight hours a day, free of charge, with films, documentaries,
concerts by John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Alison Knowles, Debussy,
Aldous Huxley, Zaha Hadid, Le Corbusier, Maria Bonomi, Frank
Lloyd Wright, Cindy Sherman, Ornette Coleman, Laurie Anderson,
Norman McLaren, Marshall McLuhan, Richard Buckminster Fuller,
ORLAN, Richard Feynman, Nadia Boulanger, Albert Einstein, Irène
Schweizer, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Marie Curie, Nam June Paik and
Bertrand Russell, among many others.
In 2023, I received a phone call from a dear friend, the remarkable
Portuguese artist Patrícia de Herédia, whom I had
met years before through a mutual friend, the architect and genius
artist João de Almeida, who was a friend of Jean Arp and
Ferdinand Gehr. Ever since I met her, I had always admired Patrícia's
work. So we talked and she said she would be delighted to do
some work together. I immediately said yes. We got together and
talked for a long time. Patrícia's work revolves around
the body, but not about the narcissus, and instead about the
consciousness of being.
I immediately decided to make a work dedicated to her. I recorded
her voice speaking three poems: by an anonymous person; by John
Done, who lived between 1571 and 1631; and by Fernando Pessoa,
who lived between 1888 and 1935. That was the beginning of my
work SOMA - which in Greek means body.
The voice always brings us strong information about the body.
We often don't pay attention, but every voice is music. I recorded
Patrícia's vocal cords and worked on them in the laboratory.
When we hear SOMA, we immediately know that it's
Patrícia - without being her, it's her dematerialized
body!
In parallel, but independently, I also made the film SOMA, going through more than two thousand years of
images of women.
At the same time, I spoke to my dear friend, the great Italian
pianist Marco Rapattoni - who, I've always said, has a mysterious
spiritual connection with the great Alfred Cortot.
Rapattoni goes beyond and dives into the deepest questions of
Humanity. So he set up an association called Friends of the Spiral in Moscufo, a town near Pescara in Abruzzo, Italy.
The town's headquarters is the Orsini palace, whose history and
family run through many centuries in Italy. The 2023 meeting
is called Art in Contemporary Life: Communication, Emotion and
the Body! Exactly what SOMA is!
Like all my work, SOMA requires time for reflection and meditation.
So we decided to have the world premiere of SOMA
- music and film - at the international meeting of what I would
call the Spiral of Friends, in Moscufo, at the meetings that
Marco Rapattoni has created and directed, bringing together composers
and thinkers.
Sappho, one of the greatest poets of all time, who lived between
around 630 and around 570 BC, was writing one of her delicious
and precious poems:
May I write words
more naked than flesh,
stronger than bone,
more resilient than sinew,
more sensitive than nerves.
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta Locarno 2023
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