Florencia Curci broadcasts live a 22-hour campfire, lit somewhere in Argentina. An installation of FM radios play field recordings, songs and stories in a live radio choreography, scripted by fire, that cannot be rehearsed as it can only be realised in the moment. Maybe some friends will come by with the things that fire brings together.
Karukinka is a radio choreography -the result of the relation of a score of fire, bodies, space, time and memory- that explores multiple dimensions of the sense of distance.
*Things that fire brings together.*
During the last summer in Argentina, I repeatedly found images of the fire on the front pages of newspapers. Most of the news was referred to forest fires, some others to street protests.
During the last winter, I had invited a group of people to participate in a series of meetings under the title “Warming listening, melting distance”. There, around campfires, we proposed experiences that tended relationships between heat and sound. Heat, like sound, are volumes with diffuse edges that radiate and transform bodies, occupying the space between. They set the scene, an ambient.
Between the covers of newspapers and incendiary television channels, one day, lost on the web, I found NASA's FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) project: a map that shows thermal anomalies around the planet in hyperreal time.
I saw a red planet.
Time flowing.
A force.
A possibility of approaching the fire far from the notion of catastrophe. It was in this derive that Karukinka appeared.
Karukinka is the name that the people who inhabited what currently occupies the Argentine province called Tierra del Fuego gave to their territory.
KAR: extreme, very
HUHIN: land, ground
KA: own, ours
On a tape, Angela Loij recounts the story of Karuk, telling how people came chasing guanacos and an earthquake left them confined to the island. Karuk is the edge, the extreme, the far.
In Karukinka, I will be away. I'm going to broadcast live a 22-hour campfire, lit somewhere in Argentina. An installation of FM radios will play field recordings, songs, stories. A live radio choreography, scripted by fire, that cannot be rehearsed without realizing. Maybe some friends will come with the things that fire brings together.
smoke signals
transmit
the fire too
gathers
teaches
tender ways to burn
Florencia Curci lives and works in Argentina as a sound and radio artist, performer, and curator. Postgraduate in Expanded Music at the UNSAM University with the project “The broken tool”, a research on non-human listening. Since 2017, FC is the Director of CASo (Sound Art Center), an institution dependent on the Ministry of Culture of Argentina promoting artistic research on sound, experimental music, and social acoustics. There, Radio CASo was founded in 2020 as an online paramo for the Argentine sound art scene, a place to congregate during the pandemic. Her work was commissioned by KunstRadio, AMEE, CA2M, MediaLab Prado (Madrid, ES), Centro Cultural Kirchner (AR), and her live performances were presented in Festival Aural (MX), Tsonami Sound Art Festival (CL), Bauhaus-Weimar Radio Art Residency (DE), among others.
Investigaciones del Futuro (IF) is a non-specific institution run by artists and architects in Villa Lynch, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
At IF we work from practice to theory, often in cooperation with other institutions, groups, and individuals. IF adapts to varied circumstances, always prioritizing the practice of socially committed artistic research in the fields of education, urban planning, construction, energy, technology, and the environment.
Our programming includes exhibitions, concerts, talks by artists, readings by writers and poets, performance art, and live radio.
We also have a carpentry shop, a radio studio, and the workspace for Biblioteca Popular Ambulante, a conceptual poetry project that works with trash and other discarded materials as language.