Canto Llano – northeast

Canto Llano – northeast
KAFKARNA, Prague, Czech Republic (2022)

Fifth planted guitar, northeast facing.
Saturday, October 8, 2022
Tree: Acacia
To Liv Nome and Julián Teubal

The installation was made in the framework of “A GARDEN – The middle ground between public and private” – Sharing practices and strategies. Meeting and symposium organized by the Center for Art and Ecology of UMPRUM (Academy of Art, Design and Architecture) – KAFKARNA in Prague. 7-9 oct. 2022.

Sobre el proyecto
Canto Llano is a ceremonial-sound action installed on the earth’s crust. It consists of planting a tree inside the mouth of a buried guitar. The sound installation begins with a ritual action that initiates the cycle of tree growth and guitar decomposition.

A guitar is the culmination of a handcrafted design carried out for centuries by different artisans and sound artists. It is a developing knowledge originating from a tree and its material, wood. Canto Llano presents the link between the beginning of this process and its culmination, as well as offering a poetic alliance between the development of biology and the growth in time of a work of art.

So:
What can we learn from sound if we move a little bit beyond aesthetics and acoustics? What can listening teach us when we try to hear the great cycles of the heavens, of the cosmos that saw us born, will see us die, and will surely die as well? What lessons does matter teach us with its rhythms, its frailties, its hardness, its ancient and future laws? Canto Llano is an open-air sound installation that feeds on these questions, on that beyond the sounds that occurs when we remain still and silent in the face of simplicity that nevertheless summons us. This installation, together with the accompanying ceremony, finally seeks the close: to remind us of our relative position in the changing universe.

The first guitar, oriented east, was planted in the city of Casilda, Argentina, on October 12, 2017.
The second guitar, south facing, was planted in the town of Nesodden, Norway, on June 5, 2018.
The third guitar, west oriented, was planted in the city of Lausanne arrêt Blécherette, Switzerland, on August 10.
The fourth guitar, north facing, was planted at Los Acantilados, Mar del Plata, Argentina, on April 18, 2021.

Photographs
Libor Galia
Liv Nome
Martín Virgili
Alzbeta