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THURSDAY 18 NOVEMBER, 19H30
Projeto
Sonoscopia / Guimarães Jazz
In its last three editions, Guimarães Jazz unfolded a
new dimension of knowledge of contemporary music, devoted to the exploration of
jazz’s most tangent territories in which the original practices and ideas
propagated by radical movements, proposing the abolition of the frontiers
between sounds, were inaugurated by seminal composers of the history of music
of the twentieth century, such as Luigi Russolo, John Cage or Karlheinz
Stockhausen, are somatized by classical tradition. A collective of artists and
musicians affiliated with this disruptive aesthetical current according to
which every available media (sound, image and language) can be used in the
production of sound discourses, Sonoscopia proposes in 2021 a duo for
non-conventional instruments and prepared piano, formed by Henrique Fernandes
and Joana Sá, two artists who for the last fifteen years have been
consolidating, with discretion, integrity and originality, their own artistic
trajectories in the margins of the consensual formats promoted by the musical
industry.
A graduate from ESMAE who began his studies in
doublebass during his adolescence, and despite his first professional efforts
in the context of the conventional circuits of classical music, Henrique
Fernandes began early in his artistic trajectory to get involved with the
experimental/improvised/multidisciplinary music scene that germinated in Porto
during the first decade of the third millennium. This particular movement, of
which Fernandes was a pivotal figure, congregated several other elements coming
from many different musical backgrounds (heavy-metal, industrial rock, hip-hop,
dub) and projected some of the most interesting projects and musicians of that
period, such as Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Gustavo Costa or João Pais Filipe.
After that period of intense activity, integrated in projects such as
trans-national collective Mécanosphère or the jazz-core band Lost Gorbachevs,
among many others, or in collaboration with some influential musicians of
contemporary music (such as Can’s former vocalist Damo Suzuki or percussionist
Fritz Hauser), Henrique Fernandes began to focus mainly on the creation of new
instruments and sound installations and, since then, his work, both under his
own name or in the context of Sonoscopia, of which he is one of the founders,
have been consistently presented In art exhibitions or in performances in
Portugal and all around the globe.
A pianist, improviser and composer, Joana Sá works
predominantly in the fields of New Music and contemporary music. Author of a vast
and impacting body of work, which she recorded and presented at some of the
most prestigious venues both in Portugal and internationally, Joana Sá’s
multifaceted creations include the trilogy for piano solo “À escuta |o aberto”
(2010-2019), that according to her own words is her most complex work and the
central theme of her doctoral thesis, which she concluded last year. Among her
collaborative projects we may highlight her relation of more than two decades
of artistic complicity with guitarist Luís J Martins in several groups of
variable geometry, the duo with Greek singer Savina Yannatou and the
collaboration with visual artist Rita Sá. Besides her specifically artistic
activity, characterized by its transversality, interdisciplinarity and
multidimensionality, Joana Sá is also a committed researcher and academic, and
she also develops community projects, organizing and monitoring residencies and
seminaries promoting music as a form of social integration and of consolidation
of memory.