BEYOND REALITY,

THE MISE-EN-SCENE
By Ilaria Termolino
 
Representation in art rises from the interpretation of reality manipulated by the artist and presented to the public in the form of an artwork.
Manuel Canelles reflects on the subtle boundary between reality and representation and he does so by using an instrument well known to him: dramaturgy.
On Stage is born as an itinerant and constantly changing project. Liquid, precisely for its ability to best adapt to the space where it is hosted. Not only does it move in various European cities (Rome,
Barcelona, Bolzano) but it also passes through different hands (actors, sociologists, writers, sound technicians, art galleries public, ordinary people…). Each time it reshapes, adapts itself to the new
context, transforms itself while maintaining a connection between the different phases. With On Stage,
indeed, we always witness the creation of a reality through narration and its subsequent representation or, more accurately, its mise-en-scène. Canelles relies on the logos, he adopts the word as his narrative code. Oral, in the case of Barcelona, and written for the scripts used in Rome and Bolzano.
 
When On Stage lands in Barcelona, Canelles directs his research on the sounds produced by the city.
He not only recorded the noises of the crowded streets of the Catalan metropolis, but also enters the houses and captures the sounds produced in these intimate and familiar places. After this first phase of “collecting sounds”, it comes the following one of “in studio manipulation”, where Canelles prepares the work for the mise-en-scène at Espronceda Gallery. Espronceda’s large space is carefully set up and prepared to reproduce the sounds collected and manipulated by the artist. Once the doors are opened to
the public of Espronceda, the staging takes place: the spectator is now facing an incomprehensible reality where his/her perception, altered and distorted by the artist, can push him/her to reconstruct a
false reality or else urge to question one’s intimate way of facing the representation and searching for reality.
Through the estrangement effect, the audience is put on the alert by Canellas, who wants to show us how narration can become a powerful means of control.

Canellas gives life, in the Espronceda Gallery of Barcelona, to a new dramaturgy of sound that disorients the viewer in order to push him/her to reflect.
Even when facing a well-constructed narrative, we should still ask ourselves: what is the difference between reality and mise-en-scène? Is it reading a text or listening to the reproduction of sounds and
voices a sufficient instrument to track down the reality of those sounds and voices? Or, is what we see and hear just a reported reality, voluntarily manipulated, corrupted, just to be fed to the public?
 
During the visit to the Espronceda Gallery, the audience does not have the possibility to trace the origin
of that word, that sound. Only the artist witnessed the moment of recording and the following manipulation in the studio. Even me, although I was there during the capture of sounds, I could not
recreate the original context, I could not remember the origin anymore nor the truth behind that sound.
My reality and the one of the audience had undergone a process of conditioning provoked by the intervention of the demiurge artist who manipulates the sound.

So what was left to do was entering the black box and sharing our experience on the recorder: here the spectator comes into play and takes an active part, collaborates in the project, becomes an actor. This generates many sensations: there’s someone who imagines a story behind those sounds, those words, and tells it by building a further narrative layer on the project. Some others, instead, do not create a story but interrogate themselves: “If you pay attention, even now, you are not enjoying a real silence.
There is always something to listen to, there is always some kind of noise. Have you ever been able to keep silent?”, is what a person asks himself. The actor-spectator will add his/her voice to the layering of listening and conditioning: the microphone in the control booth is connected to wireless headphones placed on the walls of the gallery itself, to be worn by the audience.
 
By manipulating the sounds, Canelles creates an absurd universe and causes an estrangement in the observer, with the aim of revealing the falsity, the manipulation that can be hidden behind the rapresentation. The artist, demiurge of sounds, invites us to reflect on the mistake we could make in basing our reality on something that could be the outcome of an illusion, a manipulated reality, a mise- en-scène.