Maia Urstad
RCRS - Radio Canvas Reina Sofia
Maia Urstad's new composition RCRS was created specifically for Radio Reina Sofia, and situates the radio station at the centre of its soundscape, and through that seeks to experience the museum from a distance, by making use of recordings sampled from the Radio Reina Sofia as part of the work. Sounds are collected, transformed, mixed and merged with other radio specific sounds from far and near, and rebroadcast into the digital sphere courtesy of RRS Museo Reina Sofia Radio. Urstad explores the area around the museum through fragments from an interview conducted with Clare Butcher, a Zimbabwe-born curator, who visited Madrid in June 2011. Butcher recounts her first-hand experience of a political protest being held in the streets of Madrid – close to the Reina Sofia museum. The inside of the building and its contents are investigated through the voice recordings of Isidoro Valcárcel Medina probing and analyzing the dynamics of the Reina Sofia museum’s collection. The composition spins an abstract sonic world around these fragments, creating a personal interpretation of Reina Sofia, and blurring the boundaries between the museum, the city, and the world at large through the radio universe; recorded pieces of scrambled information, fragmented voices, languages from far and near, static storms and pulsating signals. Just like these transmissions traveling great distances through time and space, the work invites the listener to travel through their own imaginations, creating narratives, routes and translations of the abstracted sound.
This piece is part of a series about the representation of the museum as an institution. The series consists on RCRS Radio Canvas Reina Sofia by Maia Urstad, the anonymous piece Ideological Soundscape of Museo Reina Sofía, Erosion/Evaporation (Scan Reina Sofía) by Blake Carrington and Institution_RS >> /dev/dsp by Oscar Martín.
