Your audiovisual performance/installation"Median Ages" has its roots in the international cooperation in post-communist countries of Africa. Could you introduce our readers to the birth of this highly layered project?
Median Ages is a consequence of a personal situation. In my childhood I travelled around African countries, where the movements of black liberation had taken place. After the 70’s processes of liberation and independence, there were still some war conflicts after the Russian Perestroika, in 1989. The support of the international communism from Russia ended with the fallen of the wall. Those countries, which had received support and help, were abandoned and immediately civil wars exploded there. After being a passerby citizen in Mozambique, Angola and South Africa, I was devoted to study its history. Reading the complex map of post-colonial Africa make me understand how archetypical roles are fundamental to construct the ideology of power. This field in history, the back independence in countries belonging to communist bloc, is less explored than other archetypical or more attractive subjects. This is another reason why I configure a different aesthetic next to understand the process of constructing power. In that sense, I erase all unique figure in the images collected, because my interest is not the iconic ideology, but the more specific context of surrounding, the environment of humans or the landscape of materiality. In these historical processes, I also do a research about the history of acquiring material in mines, land and earth.  

Your work using historical sound archives has been fundamental for this project: an attempt to going beyond a "reviewing process": in your opinion what is the potential of "appropriation art"?
Work with sound resources as speeches or sound archives allow me to review the historical process. Working with open media implies a new way of thinking the mainstream representation. The reproduction processes of historical memory reinforce power structures. The obliterated voices, those that have been silenced by memory processes enhanced by mass media communication, could be reinserted in the collective imagination through new voices. This process facilitates the preservation of deranged, annihilated or exterminated social groups, different ethnics and quite often oppressed ideologies. To work for the rehabilitation of the libertarian thought using sound techniques, popular music or political speech, is an aesthetical and ethical resolution that confronts the unified figure of an icon of power. These strategies are trying to demolish unified mainstream culture represented by God, King or Dictatorships. And that is why they use appropriation in its style. To work with sounds and images already taken finishes with the idea of the authorship and moreover opens a process to represent the social group or the community.  

Your music has an important role. Audio has a huge importance in your works. the use of soundtrack and sound archive has not a diegethical aims, but tend to sabotage the common perception mechanism like in the films of the french director Alain-Robbe Grillet. Could you introduce our readers to this aspect of your filmmaking?
Documentary photography engages with the unseen, hidden and intangible aspects. Within a cinematographic style of long tracking shot resulting in a spectral, disembodied gaze film. The piece haunts a visceral soundscape in a DIY noise composition. Through corrupted sounds and noises, the piece tries to give deeper sense to images. As I told, the film is configured by a landscape of images that try to disembody, in a search for material. And sound is adding to this perception the sense of a spectrum conducted by frequencies. Here, melodies and harmonies are completely deconstructed, obliterated, by harsh noise and popular voices.

What aspect of your work do you enjoy the most? What gives you the biggest satisfaction?
On one side, there is the sound. I work with speech and discourse. I use echoes, reverbs and high frequencies, processes of manipulating sound that permit to underline very particular ideas or sounds, those that are striking thoughts about freedom or struggle, but also samples that create an idea of gaze, spectrum or deeper life. But, on the other side, there are the images. The selection of the images creates an iconoclastic figure for the population. Once a lecture of the shape and figure is done, it never displays a hero or a unique figure standing alone, but a community. This corresponds to the general idea against leaders, icons or mainstream culture. It is because the occidental culture has been erected from the idea of the icon against the masses.
 

What artistic media do you prefer to work in and there any that you don’t like to use? 
Live audiovisual has been the most important media I have found in my career. I am based in electronic art and I cannot understand an artwork responding to the contemporary social conditions that does not include a sense of movement, change, music and image in movement. Also, I am interested in collective works, working in group, rather than presenting unique solo artists. There is an important fact and is the use of DIY instruments in live performances.
 

We find that your art is rich of references. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

Since I have a background in history, sociology and anthropology my art is based in political activism, those movements from the 60s and 70s. Artists that were involved in the de-colonialism process. Art from South-America or Central-America is now on view at Tate Modern: Guerrilla Action Group, Group Material and those more contemporary such as the activism of Pussy Riot. Giving a response to economic and social transformation, artists’ collectives re-activate local processes with apolitical manifestations to improve their conditions. At the same time, tendencies in underground music and anti-establishment culture arises altogether with actions against Vietnam War in the United States of America The history of oppressed culture encounters a social expression in blues, folk and rock and roll music. The industry production in the southern coast replaces the logical discourse of new Christians, because the new deal and the wealth after 2nd world war. Blues music and rock roll fuses into new tendencies such noise rock, psychobilly and the uses of first synthesizers. The history of electronic music and techno introduces new sound, rhythms and music modulations that contribute to the understandings of factors such as anti-mainstream industry and power of ideology. Bands and music from the 70s like Silver Apples, Velvet Underground, Neu!, Can, and the experimentation with electronic music and techno culture are main influence in my work.

What’s next for Laura Plana Gracia? Are there any new projects on the horizon? 

My artistic project is presented under the moniker Lara Pearl. The project titled Median Ages will be touring to Portugal next summer, at Invisible Places Festival, where major Academic and Research Center for Electronic Music and Sound are participating, IRZAM, SARC, EAVI Goldsmith, etc… Also Median Ages will be on tour to England, next October. A part, as curator, manager and promoter I am developing a series of experimental electronic music, techno and dark ambient gigs with underground sound and sonic artist. It is in a concert venue in East London, near Whitechapel gallery. All welcome.

link to stigmart art magazine 

official link http://issuu.com/stigmart10press/docs/stigmart_videofocus_autumn_2014_-_s

direct link http://issuu.com/stigmart10press/docs/stigmart_videofocus_autumn_2014_-_s/40

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