Radio Papesse

HAMONI LAPUDE ANAN WAS AWARDED THE SÜDEN OPEN CALL 1ST PRIZE.

The Yaghans were the southernmost indigenous people in the world, living in the islands south of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. They were nomads who traveled by canoes between islands, with no religion, no king, no writing, and no past. They left few trace. Today there's only one woman who speaks their language, her voice appears in this work, as minimalist poetry of a dying language.

Hamoni Lapude Anan (2010) is a sound anthropological investigation about the story of how the sonority of an environment have changed, recreating the Yaghan world.

It is an acoustic historical exploration, a musical representation of everyday life; a cyclic narrative composition linked by nature, locating the listener in an uncertain place between reality and imagination; mixing soundscapes with electroacustic, radio drama, feature and radio art.

Trying to rescue the essence of telling stories around a fire to the next generations as it used to be; to preserve at least some few features of a culture in a process of extinction. Hamoni lapude anan means, we used to make canoes in Yaghan language, considering the canoe as a symbol of their nomadic freedom, and also paradoxically their ending in sedentary life. The sound piece was produced with a big diversity of field recordings during the four seasons, discovering the acoustic environment in detail through the intimate textures of Nature, and using original Yaghan tools found at archeological excavations. For this work it was made an intense search of personal and institutional sound archives around the world, from the first recordings made in wax cylinder a hundred years ago until the last stories told by an elderly speaker.

Jury's comments:

The language matter is something we are really interested in, both in relation to oral history and identity transmission (or lost). We found Hamoni Lapude Anan a very subtle, not invasive piece of sonic ethnographic research; the gaze, or better to say the act of listening seems not to impose specific readings and the piece leave the time to get lulled by different layers of narratives and diverse historical moments. The feminine voice brings a kind of gentle epic and a sense of domesticity as well into the piece. [Radio Papesse]

To recycle a dying language, as if it was sound poetry. It brings back some considerations about the relation between art and sound into real life, reminding us that they are ubiquitous. In doing so, this work seems to problematize the relation between sound poetry and verbal language: does a person, who’s the only one to speak a language, become a poet mastering a language that is alien to the others? Sound poetry: what is it? where is it? And, what is the impact of a dying language? The work is characterised by a strong perseverance, time of documentation and research; by the effort, in term of imaginary, to recreate fictional or past environments; by the quality of recordings. The author is even behind this perseverance, his statement beyond the strict radio art genres' definitions. Between the past, the present and what he archives for the future - no need to call it a feature, an electroacustic composition of a fiction - the ears stay open and curious till the end. [Anna Raimondo & Younes Baba Ali]

Joaquin Cófreces was born in 1975; he is a sound storyteller (feature, radio art, radio drama, museum installations, field recording, sound art, soundscapes) from Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. His work has been featured by broadcasters, festivals and galleries around the world (China, Iran, India, France, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Belgium, Norway, Croatia, Finland, Australia, etc.). He understands radio like a space of experimentation, sound as a global way of telling stories in an emotional language. He lectured at the Berlin Art University, the Bauhaus Universitat Weimar, at the Universidad Iberoamericana de Mexico, at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, at ETER and TEA, at the Centro Cultural España Cordoba, in Norway and Croatia. His features and radio art pieces were internationally awarded and nominated: Premio Radio sin limites (Buenos Aires 2006), Bienal Internacional de Radio (Mexico, 2006 and 2012), Premio abri los ojos (Fm Metro – Buenos Aires 2009), 8th International Radio Festival (Iran 2007); 10th International Radio Festival (Iran 2009, Best sound editor - Best innovative program) Phonurgia Nova (Radio Art - France 2009) Ake Blomstrom Award (Ebu - IFC 2010); Prize Fundacion Nuevo periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI - 2007). Among the honorable mentions: Premio periodistico Rey de España (Spain 2007), Grand Prix of Radio (URTI - France 2007), Septima Bienal Internacional de Radio (Mexico 2008).