Diego Orendain

Espacio Morelos invites you to a guided tour of the exhibition Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing by artist Diego Orendain.

Apparitions

Sound, image, and composition

For me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it is about, but the inner music words make. — Truman Capote

The invention of sound in the image

The way we use words goes beyond their specific meaning: when we communicate, we interpret and also transform them. In this way, we assign multiple senses to language, which serves a practical function while allowing communication to expand.

“What apartment number is your home?” asks a voice on the other end of the line. An apartment can be a house, a home. Yet not every place can be given that meaning. A home is built in the same way language is built: as an imaginary shaped by experience, capable of granting new interpretive meaning to the world. We also transform sounds: we call them music, harmony, or composition to expand our listening experiences. Listening ceases to be passive; we choose what to hear, how to hear it, and how to reinvent the ways sound can be composed.

Easy Listenign for the Hard of Hearing

Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing is a dialogical space: an encounter between sound and light that becomes image. Through their forms, objects transmit connections for an acoustic experience. Diego Orendain proposes a way of listening that can also be seen: he invents through sound and allows images to be heard. Listening becomes visual through the acoustic capacities of sound. Light captures the experience and transforms it into images that move in random rhythms. Sounds build a home within the image: waves of light and sound in a sensory ebb and flow.

Claude Debussy, who used sound “to evoke an image, a color, or a feeling, thus creating a sonic atmosphere and introspection within a more dramatic discourse,” may be one of the keys that later inspired musicians such as Gérard Grisey, pioneer of spectral music that emerged in France in the 1970s. Diego Orendain draws from this exploration in the installation, establishing a dialogue between sound and its acoustic and visual possibilities.

Spectral music as form

Spectral music conceives sound as a signal that decomposes into multiple components: not an isolated core, but a whole made of distinct parts. This perspective revolutionized traditional ideas of composition by proposing an innovative approach to sonic phenomena. While Gérard Grisey placed his essential, vital search in sound—understood as both the beginning and the end of the creative journey—this project extends that exploration into the visual realm, also conceived as an acoustic phenomenon.

French philosopher and composer Hugues Dufourt wrote of the specificity of spectral composition: This work of musical composition operates directly on the internal dimensions of sonority. It relies on the global control of the sound spectrum and consists of extracting from the material the structures that arise from it.

Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing projects these sonic dimensions outward as a visual phenomenon which, like invented words, creates a dialogue within the image.

— Espacio Morelos