Fellowship awarded to Yella (Daniela Abelaira Roxo) for the project Body of Work
Jury: Phill Niblock, Nuno Faria, Rui Eduardo Paes, Emanuel Dimas Pimenta, Isabel Alves, Adriana Sá and Andrew Fenchel
Body of Work
The project consists of building an instrument that is applied to a costume. This application includes latex, violin and guitar strings stretched by frets. When it's put on, the costume transforms the performer into a musical instrument with the scale of a harp (the guitar strings and frets are identical to those on a Portuguese guitar and represent the truss rod of the instrument). The amplification of this body-instrument produces intriguing sounds complemented by the voice of the performer.
In the performance the body-instrument was explored in three parts:
1. Hair Beat, amplification of the sound of the hair upon shaking the head to a rhythm symbiotic with that of the heartbeat.
2. Violin and Guitar, the violin bow that touches the Portuguese guitar strings applied to frets, stretched from the left wrist to the waist.
3. Latex Harp, latex strings of two different densities that form a musical scale when pulled; strings stretched from the right wrist to the right ankle.
Body of Work is the 7th and final phase of the audiovisual project Back and Forward which conceptually explores the movement of the muscles.
Biography
Yella (Daniela Abelaira Roxo, Lisbon, 1977) carried out works in several areas, having begun with painting. She also worked as a costume designer for theater and dance. Painting and drawing took Yella to illustration, having been an illustrator for Diário de Notícias' daily column for political opinion between 1997 and 2005.
Her project Ye77a (read Yella) is born is 2003 with the construction of a website that showcased music, photography, drawing and clothes as parts of a single project.
Into 2005, Yella initiated the conceptual and experimental audiovisual trilogy The Brain Soundtrack.