Leah Rico's art practice explores the function of language in relation to the constant state of flux and transition of an individual's identity. Most recently, she has used the phenomenological characteristics of audio to take the work into the lived space of the audience. Casting language as quintessence, Rico breaks down the sonic structure of speech, revealing its hidden histories and mapping its unspoken politics.
March 28-29,2008: Sonic Fragments: Narrative and Mediation in Sound Art, Princeton NJ. If you can't make it to New Jersey, visit virtually here
a wasted miracle "Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. 'I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began,' he said to me...And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." "Funes" (1942)
October 2007: "it is only by following the course of time prescribed that we could hasten through gigantic spaces separating us from each other"...a sound installation that examines the structure of myth as it pertains to the identity of the exile.
"One August evening in 1956, when I was ten years old, I heard a thousand-year-old shepherd wrapped in a cloak of smoke tell a story around a Carpathian campfire. He said that a long time ago, when time was an idea whose time hadn't come, when the pear trees made peaches, and when fleas jumped into the sky wearing iron shoes weighing ninety-nine pounds each, there lived in these parts a sheep called Mioritza.
The flock to which Mioritza belongs is owned by three brothers. One night, Mioritza overhears the older brothers plotting to kill the youngest in the morning, in order to steal his sheep. The younger brother is a dreamer, whose "head is always in the stars." Mioritza nestles in his arms, and warns the boy about the evil doings soon to unfold, and begs him to run away. But, in tones as lyrical as they are tragic, the young poet-shepherd tells his beloved Mioritza to go see his mother after he is killed, and to tell her that he didn't really die, that he married the moon instead, and that all the stars were at the wedding. The boy then tells Mioritza the name of each star, where it came from, and what its job is, just in case the mother, who is not easily fooled, wants to know names and faces. Before morning, the older brothers murder the young shepherd, as planned. There is no attempt to resist, no counterplot, no new deviousness. Fate unfolds as foretold. The moon has a new husband, and the story must be known.
Mioritza wanders, looking for the boy's mother. But she tells everyone along the way the story as well. The murder was really a wedding, the boy married the moon, and all the stars were present. She names each star and explains where it came from. The Pleiades are bad girls who swept dust into the eyes of the sun. The Little Dipper feeds kind milk to the poor because it had once been an evil Titan who wasted his gold. Venus was once a vain queen who loved an evil angel. The circle of Orion is made of girls who can't stop dancing. There are carpenters, witches, and smiths up there, worlds of people transformed and made forever exemplary. Mioritza knows everyone in the sky. She never tires of the story. She laments the death of her beloved with stories of the origin of the worlds.
Her wandering takes her across the rivers of the Carpathian mountains to the Black Sea, a path that describes the natural border of Romania. Her migration defines the space of the people, a space the Romanian poet Lucian Blaga called "mioritic." Mioritza herself is the moving border of the nation, a storytelling border whose story is borderless and cosmic. She calls into being a place and a people that she circumscribes with narrative." AC
Jun 2 2007:NOCTURMINAL, an exploration of liminal space..."Austerlitz spoke at length about the marks of pain which, as he said he knew well, trace countless fine lines through history. In his studies of railway architecture...he could never quite shake off thoughts of the agony of leave-taking and the fear of foreign places, although such ideas were not part of architectural history proper."
Project site
Some summer maybe: ICE CREAM HEADACHE An ice cream truck drives around the five burroughs of New York City playing alternate takes on the Mr. Softee theme. Count Tusk, Brian Dewan, Adam MAtta, Todd Nocera, Anton Glamb, Daniel Boris Dzula, Terumi Narushima, Luke Dubois, Michael Hearst, Timothy Nohe, Video Giant, ]{3y, David Simons, Dax Van Aalten, Andrea Fischer, Nina Katchadourian, Matt Waugh, Puzzleboy, Leah Rico, Lynnea Scalora, Jeffrey J. Borckardt Phd, Kanipchen-Fit, Naturalistic, Tristan Perich, John McMahon, Dustortion, Chrises. Suite 405
Article on npr.org: Click Here
An oldie but goodie
