The Chairs of Tàpies: Eduard Escoffet

The Chairs of Tàpies is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Pompeu Fabra University. The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day.

Eduard Escoffet is a poet and sound artist. He has published books of poetry a lot (2012), The earth and the sky (2013, published in Spanish in 2018 with the title ground and sky) and Less and everything (2017), apart from the artist’s book Estramps with Evru (2012) and the poster-poem Plantation (2021), Carles Hac Mor award. In 2018 he was a finalist for the Prix Bernard Heidsieck, awarded by the Center Pompidou and the Fondazione Bonotto. With the electronic band Bradien, with whom he collaborated between 2009 and 2016, he published the albums Pols (2012) and Scale (2015). He is currently a member of the group Barba Corsini, with which he published the album in 2021 A new fire He is the author with Gianluca Abbate of the virtual reality film body inside (Italy, 2019), winner of the Goethe Prize at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.

In 2022 he composed the piece Ode to the Walking Class for the German vocal group Sprechbohrer within the framework of the project The Poet’s Sound. In 2022, the sound performance for tapes premiered in Barcelona. Utopia and slavery (piece for 25 mechanical voices), which could later be seen in Tarragona and Madrid. In 2023 he presented the double exhibition Growth and Degrowth by Howard Roark at Chiquita Room and The Green Parrot (Barcelona) and published the album of sound poetry and vocal improvisation Bastide, published by Erratum (Paris) and Sonhoras (Barcelona).

T/H-partitura

A sound dialogue between Bernard Heidsieck and Antoni Tàpies

Eduard Escoffet |Length: about 25 min

Between 1959 and 1960, Bernard Heidsieck composed Poème-partition T, a sound poem dedicated to a painting by Tàpies, who in those years was forging his career in the European gallery circuit, and especially in Paris. As he had done earlier with paintings by Jean Degottex and other artists, Heidsieck wrote and recorded with his tape recorder a poem that played with layering and the timbre of the voice, and which was, in the end, an open dialogue with Tàpies. Heidsieck sent the poem to Tàpies, but the painter never responded and their dialogue was cut short.

T/H-partitura [T/H-score] thus seeks to activate this dialogue between the two creators. The resulting piece remakes the sound materials from the Heidsieck poem while adding features that create connections between the two poetics, such as the chair, the main theme of this series. It is a quadrophonic piece done with four cassette tapes and live voice, conceived as well to dialogue with the museum building and the railway sounds that run through it. As in previous pieces by Escoffet, such as Utopia i esclavatge [Utopia and Slavery] (La Capella, 2022) and Echo and the Oracle (CCCB, 2023), T/H-partitura experiments with vocal overlaying and physicality of the voice. In this case, furthermore, it explores common features between the work of Bernard Heidsieck and that of Tàpies.

While they were never to have a creative dialogue between them, there are many features that bring them close together. Both creators impregnate their works with reality—with objects, in one case, and with recordings from the street in the other. They manipulate materials—earth and paint in one case, the recording tape itself in the other—and also go beyond the supports themselves—the canvas and the page, respectively—in creating works that must be seen or listened to live, putting the body front and centre, whether in gesture or voice. Many poets have written about Tàpies, but few have accomplished what Bernard Heidsieck did in shifting the essence of the artistic code of Tàpies to another support: he makes the painting anew by working with text and voice in a way that is true to Tàpies. T/H-partitura, therefore, is the reconstruction of these echoes.