Print (MA)

Teresa Arêde

I’ve spent a long time in music education, mostly studying classical voice. As a reaction against the constraints of tamed singing, I began treating the voice as matter, shaping it as if I could see it. This exercise opened the door between the imagery and the voice. For me, sound, both real and imagined, is the connecting glue between the existence of objects and their multiple stories.

Because of stage experience earned over the years, I grew increasingly interested in the idea of artificial narratives. These were brought to light with the help of stage design, where architecture comes close to a lucid dream. Through researching the poetic qualities of these half-dreamt worlds I have arrived at subjects connected to the absurd and the volatile mutability of truth. I have also been leaning on the idea of language as a manipulator of truth, many times used as a detrimental stifling tool. I enjoy the making of artefacts that look as if they were found and are part of an almost familiar history. I use ephemeral soft materials, like plaster and leftover pieces of cloth, so the stories these objects tell are ever-changing ones. This is stage archeology, artificial history and visual essays from within.

Teresa Arêde was born in Viseu, Portugal in 1991. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Porto and Classical Voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Currently she is finishing her MA Print online, back in her parents farm in Portugal.

Contact

moc.liamg@edera.aseret

https://www.teresaarede.com

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Degree Details

School of Arts & Humanities

Print (MA)

Since I moved back to the farm in Portugal, everything that I have been making absorbed a quality of randomness - allowing different things to bleed into each other. Although London was always louder than the farm, my surroundings are now a lot more influential. I started thinking about my permanence here and on how a lot of my current visual ideas are almost site specific. I became interested in making the farm a protagonist, imagining the impossible constructions that would fit here, and the illogical stories they would like to tell. The healthy artificiality that dreams exhale and the mysterious quality of some narratives are now essential ideas in my practice.

I made a short-film, a fake tale documenting the appearance of strange objects and ruins in the farm. Some of the found artefacts interest me because I can’t exactly describe them - the uncertainty of their identity positively puzzles me. This moving image experiment is a preliminary speculation connecting the artefacts I ‘find’ with the stories I would like to tell. I’m interested in the lives of these objects and the ability to be the first one to tell one of their multiple stories, as they enjoy the freedom of unnamed things.

Sound is one of the central parts of the work. On my fake expedition I’ve found writings that I interpreted as visual scores - these are an exploration of the ability of the voice to work upwards and downwards, and in an imaged three-dimensional space.

In the script for this short film, I try to debate and reevaluate my own use of language as a sometimes detrimental thing - for objects don’t care what they are to be called or what stories are created for them. Regardless, they will continue their existence.