Tàpies’ Chairs: Cabosanroque

Aquest event forma part de: The Chairs of Tàpies

Tàpies’ Chairs is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Pompeu Fabra University. The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day.

The sound action for this fifth chair of Tàpies, entitled Playback, is a proposal by Cabosanroque created exclusively for chairs: a dialogue between the sincerity of the materials’ sonority, the voice of the object and the artifice of its representation. Straddling performance and installation, the action plays with the idea of the materiality of concrete music, often related to the material informalism of Tàpies, revealing the tensions in such staging. Understanding chairs as sonorous objects and autonomous performers, the materials and chairs occupying the space are left to speak. For perhaps, in this regard, the chairs do not need anyone else to speak for them.

Cabosanroque is a group comprised of Laia Torrents Carulla and Roger Aixut Sampietro. Their work has developed in relation to sound and its performative capacities. In turn, their interventions question the spectator when it comes to inhabiting space, understood as physical, temporal and conceptual, as sonorous and visual. They are interested in artifice and its relationship to human beings.

Cabosanroque search for the tensions between disciplines such as music, theatre, the visual arts and sound, striving to open up the edges, becoming spaces in conflict. Their academic training (in music, industrial engineering and architecture) brings them to use technology in all their works, where it is always understood as a tool, as a medium and not an aesthetic, as an ongoing research project. They frequently collaborate with other artists and with thinkers and writers.

Their work has been seen nationally and internationally. In recent years they have shown at: CaixaForum + (2023), Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2023), Cité de l’Architecture (Paris, 2021), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2020–2021), Centre for Contemporary Arts of Glasgow (2019), La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2018), Schaubude (Berlin, 2018), Fonoteca Nacional de México (Mexico City, 2012), Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona, 2023, 2016 and 2008), Sónar (Barcelona, 2018, 2015, 2014, 2010 and 2008; Frankfurt, 2008; Santiago de Chile, 2015), Grec Festival de Barcelona (Barcelona, 2023, 2021 and 2006), Festival Temporada Alta (Girona, 2022, 2019, 2016, 2012 and 2009), La Filature Scène Nationale de Mulhouse (2019), Théâtre Garonne, Scène européenne de Toulouse (2024, 2020 and 2019), Unidram Festival (Berlin, 2009).

Since 2015 they have been resident artists at the Fundació Lluís Coromina.

[Photo: Inga Knölke.]