The general objective of this project is to imagine with the students (4th, 5th and 6th grade) new rites and ceremonies to build relationships and affections with the species that surround us (all of them), around a process of renaturalization of the neighborhood generated from the school as an emitter.
From the school to the neighborhood, the city and the world, we think of the plant as an ark, as an interface of encounter, between the common and the differential.
To develop the interventions during the second quarter, we are working on the idea of plant species and seeds "enriched" with stories and musical creations.
Research gardens
The 4th grade students developed with Sergio, Salas and Fran, from Nomad Garden, a botanical exploration of the gardens around the school, identifying botanical species and drawing them. From this work they built a seedbed-parihuela to take care of it throughout the development of the project on which the sound part of the project would be based.
Interviews with gardeners
Once the gardens were explored, we went with the 5th grade students to interview the gardeners and caretakers to see what personal stories were behind each plant. The students edited the interviews, identifying interesting phrases that would later be used for the last layer of the project with the 6th grade students.
we draw routes and think about what sounds are in them on the way from home to school
we create questions and practice with audio recorders forming a team with specialized tasks
the students' creativity in inventing notation systems and recording interesting moments in the interviews is infinite...
Composing with the sound memories of plants
While 5th grade was preparing the interviews, the 6th grade students and I were composing musical pieces for each garden. Each pair remixed music associated with the neighborhood with traditional music from the native regions of the plants in each garden. On that sound base, the students added the phrases that their 5th grade classmates had edited, creating a sound and textual narrative for each of the citizen gardens around the school.
As we create loops, we incorporate related basic concepts, think about basic structures of rhythms and melodies, work on listening and reading the sound wave to create loops that close well the rhythmic pattern...etc
The dynamics of the sessions are based on compositional exploration with play.antropoloops and sharing at the end of the class playing live the progress made. We discuss in group the perception of the mixes and possible ways of work and improvement.
As ideas for combining and articulating loops emerge, we begin to think about the idea of a score, and to explore a structure for the piece, combining the passages we make with fragments from the interviews. It is interesting how each couple develops their own graphic resources to create a notational system with the keys they have assigned to each loop.
A bank of memories and seeds
After this process and calendar of coordinated interventions, the parihuela was loaded with green shoots in which we could listen to their past sound memories together with the present of the people who maintain the gardens and the future that the students had composed. In each seedbed, hung the Nendo Dango balls created by Nomad with the 4th grade students... ready to germinate the plot of the green lung..
The sound pieces were installed on the pariguela through 2 touchboards (https://www.bareconductive.com/collections/touch-board?srsltid=AfmBOooOO091_pbZB48Psbqjid86UCoECK4Qh_7-6kV14yzL1ims24mz) from Bare Conductive
Procession
on May 24, 2022 the students of CEIP Huerta de Santa Marina, took the parihuela in procession through all the gardens and sounding their musical and sonorous remixes, like a natural brotherhood that imagined new rites in the neighborhood. The high point of the tour was at the site of the green lung, claimed as a green area for the neighborhood from the public in recent years, where the Nendo Dango balls were thrown so that their seeds germinate on the other side of the closed door.
Unfortunately the new PP mayor's office considers that it is better to continue speculating than to create public green areas in the historic center, breaking with the commitments of the previous mayor.
The 5 skins of the Huerta
At the end of the course, an open presentation was made in the school together with the other project that was being developed in the center with PLANEA by Cotidiana. The 6th grade students played live the pieces they had created for the parihuela
design and development: Nomad Garden (Salas Mendoza, Sergio Rodriguez and Fran pazos) and Antropoloops (Fran Torres and Rubén Alonso)
participants: 4th, 5th and 6th grade students of CEIP Huerta Santa Marina
institution: red PLANEA
year: 2022
