Jingle
Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981). Lives and works in Barcelona. Degree in Fine Art from the University of Barcelona. Currently in her final year at The Cooper Union University, New York. Has complemented this training by attending workshops on the performing arts, sound art, video art and sculpture. This has equipped the artist with multi-disciplinary know-how, though she currently focuses more on the language of performance. Her work has been seen in collective exhibitions and in the Young European Creation travelling biennial (in France, Lithuania, Austria, Italy, Portugal and Catalonia), whilst in 2010 she presented the solo projects The Lecture at The Great Hall and The Announcement, a song at the Lobby, both at The Cooper Union.
jingle [
]. A short, catchy tune, usually written to accompany a radio or television commercial.
JINGLE is a performance proposal by Laia Estruch based on producing and editing a sound commercial for an art project. The project starts on an adaptation of one of her earlier works, The Announcement, a song, which she presented at The Cooper Union University (NY) in April 2010. In this performance, she used a tune – which had been going around in her head for years – adding lyrics to it, basically informing about an event in order to attract an audience.
We are used to communications about art projects taking the form of postcards or other printed matter, but in The Announcement, a songEstruch turns the usual custom on its head. In it, the artist replaced the “printed word” for the “sung word”. Estruch herself sang the jingle, causing an immediate effect on all those that heard her. Unconsciously, for days, they sang her opening lines: “Hello everyone. My name is Laia Estruch, and I would like to announce…”.As a result, in the manner of viral marketing, her “Hello everyone…” became a veritable statement for her work.
A couple of years ago, Estruch began to explore ways of presenting the less relevant part of the creative process to spectators. This study has led her to seek structures that enable her to make mere anecdotes public. These are things that are, generally, of little interest, but which she turns into the main focus of her work. The idea of putting a discourse to music, narrating an art project and turning it into a “singing lecture” was present in her ways of doing. In JINGLE she makes this desire a reality through an experimental approach: the work, closed in on itself like a Russian doll, is gradually stripped off before the spectator, to whom all the hidden layers of information are revealed.
On the other hand, whilst her latest productions took the performative act as the work itself, without any kind of objectual formalisation, her project for Espai Cub uses the 27-cubic-metre volume of this space as a stage in which to amplify and modulate, not a sound, but the whole working process required in order to create a sound. The object of JINGLE is to adapt the song in The Announcement to the musical structure of a jingle in order to make this Estruch’s advertising slogan. We should mention, also, that, unlike her earlier projects, in JINGLEthe artist adopts an organic working method. Firstly, she enlists the cooperation of Xavi Lloses (musical arranger and producer) with whom she works on the sound part, creating and adapting scores to turn them into jingle and, secondly, she works with the other professionals who help her to bring this creative process to fruition.
The (re)presentation of the sound itinerary taken by JINGLE explains the process behind its construction through three shows – beginning, crisis and denouement – and a final, closing event – at which the jingle will be presented on a vinyl disc. The “jingle cell” is a reflection on the characteristics of the work itself, and the artist’s own harmonious voice turns all its conceptual content into a sensual sound effect.
Show 1: April 14; Show 2: April 28; Show 3: May 12; Close: May 2. In cooperation with Xavi Lloses (composition, arrangements and sound design work), Ariadna Serrahima (work of typography and graphic design of JINGLE) Carla Tramullas (photography), Josephine Grundy (voiceover work and English translations), Ariadna Estalella (stage movement work).
Colaborators
TallerBDN
