Architecture of Friendship live concert

Foto: Gorka Bravo

As part of the Gardens programme of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz (Austria), Etopia presents the Architecture of Friendship in a hybrid format, live streaming and seated event.

The Architecture of Friendship is a collective project inspired by the notion of ecosystem and the value of interdependence led by Spanish composer/engineer Santiago Latorre. The group takes its name from the words of Hannah Arendt, who after being accused of lack of love for the Jews, responded:
 
“You are quite right.
I don’t love any people
-neither the French, nor the North American, nor the Jewish, nor the Blacks.
I love only my friends.”
 
The project began as an exploration of real-time vocal manipulations. After being away from music-making for several years due to an injury in both arms, Latorre started experimenting with contactless movement sensors to modify the sound of his voice, looking to gain back the feeling of playing an instrument.
 
This first exploration grew and shifted through collaborations with artists and friends within the ecosystem of the Sound Laboratory at Etopia Center for Art and Technology in Zaragoza. American composer Colin Self, Colombian artist Carlos María Romero, and Spanish singer Nieves Arilla came together to produce the Architecture of Friendship music album. The sequence of songs is offered as hinges to activate and exercise empathy, to awaken hope and recharge enthusiasm, perhaps even to encourage care between the familiar and strange.
 
For this performance, the artists developed in collaboration with Spanish choreographer Sara Paniagua a technology that uses sound and movement to process lights in real time. 

Santiago Latorre

Foto: Camille Blake

Nieves Arilla

Foto: Juana Jiménez

Sara Paniagua

Santiago Latorre is an artist and engineer interested in how the organic and the living participate, and can affect all phases of a sound object, from the moment of conception to perception. This fascination is apparent in his projects including the Sonification of the Human Genome, the private performance A Pie De Cama, which consists of a collection of a cappella songs sung directly into the ear of people lying in bed, and in his two solo albums Órbita (Accretions, 2008) and Eclíptica (Foehn Records, 2011).

He has worked on various dance, art, fashion and film projects presented in spaces such as Tate Modern (London), Quanta Arts Foundation (Taipei) and Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona). In 2012, he composed the music for the film Interior. Leather Bar, co-directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews.

Latorre curates FUGA in Zaragoza, Spain, an artist in residency program, as well as an exhibition platform and educational content incubator that fosters community, interconnecting artists, creatives and collectives who, from different angles of music, art and technology work with sound as their tool.

Sara Paniagua is a choreographer, performer and lighting designer. She understands dance as an active agent of resignification; of transformation of the generic, the inconsequential, the residual in energetic performative processes of the consciousness of the body. Paniagua often works around situations of hybridisation, juxtaposition, combination, decontextualisation, or the questioning of the idea of time.

She collaborates with artists and institutions in Latin America and lives in the Basque Country where she has collaborated in various research projects on artistic practices related to the body since 1998.
 

Nieves Arilla is a singer and composer. For more than 15 years she contributed with her voice to records and concerts of Spanish artists such as Javier Álvarez, Pablo Guerrero, Diego Vasallo or Jabier Muguruza. She was part of the cabaret project Las Maris with Javier Álvarez and the pop song group Facunda. She has also composed music for audiovisual projects, installations and short films by Amanda Pola, Yann-Loïc Lambert and Pilar Gutiérrez, among others. At present, she keeps active the project A Pie De Cama together with Santiago Latorre.