The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation
by Billy Bultheel
In dialogue with Gonçalo Sena
Curated by Marie-Therese Bruglacher and Marcos Silva
Billy Bultheel’s The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation is an ongoing investigation into the compositional relations between music, space, movement, and the body and/as instrument. Written for nine bodies, it brings together an ensemble of musicians with classical and subcultural backgrounds. In collaboration with Galeria Zé dos Bois, this iteration of The Thief’s Journal goes into a site-specific dialogue with sculptural works by Gonçalo Sena.
An empty warehouse in Marvila: A sacral and uncanny chapel; an archaeological site of some sort. Rain drips from the ceiling; a metal plate is crying; strange corals grow from the wall; water is seeping from a pool. A squid on a chair. A forgotten space. The lights in the office are still on.
The two artists, Bultheel a composer and Sena a visual artist, speak the same language yet through different mediums. They share a quest of creating and uncreating, echo each other in space and time. Where Bultheel writes music as space and reads space as music, Sena makes sculptures that embody the beautiful fragility of nature, casted temporarily into permanence, yet always porous to their decay.
The night is ephemeral. We witness it solely as this: a fleeting moment in time.
Intrigued by the moment of catharsis, Bultheel conflates various styles of music from Medieval polyphonic compositions to ensemble music, noise and metal. Bound together in the act of listening by a feeling of ecstasy and devotion, these musics belong to sacral spaces and industrial clubs alike. Bultheel’s meditation on the temporal and spatial qualities of listening is answered in Sena’s material exploration into the poetics of space. Together, they excavate something uncanny, a shadow place.
Reminding of Jean Genet’s thief from his semi-fictional autobiography “The Thief’s Journal”, figures wander through the space. They caress instruments and shatter plates. They steal their sounds. They find strange objects and sacrifice them to the space. They become musical and spatial poets, choreographing a space. The space starts breathing.
On the way home, waiting at a traffic light, a strangely formed rock eyes me from the other side of the street. We greet. We pass. I feel its eyes on my back as I walk away.
