Vibration makes us and unmakes us, vibration passes through us, connects us. Can feeling with a focus on vibration transform the way we live and perceive the world?

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scientific research in the field of physics brought about radical paradigm shifts in the understanding of space, time, matter, energy, life, death, consciousness and the body. The phenomenon of vibration was at the centre of these revolutions on several fronts: as an invisible force that cuts across all of reality; as the nexus that blurs the distinction between body and wave, between matter and energy, between matter and the immaterial; as the essence of thoughts or pre-verbal communications; or, for religion and the occult, as the aggregator of the soul and the spiritual body.

Beyond the disputes between classical and quantum thermodynamics, or between the different paths of experimental psychology, the concept of vibration has also crossed important artistic vanguards in different disciplinary areas. We find it among the symbolists, the Dadaists, the futurists, in the foundations of the narrative for Joseph Conrad, or in the brain waves that play a piece by the composer Alvin Lucier.

And yet, few people consciously and consistently try to approach reality in its vibratory dimension, or systematically perceive their own body as an antenna-conductor-transmitter of vibrations—perhaps because of the difficulties imposed by our perceptual limitations.

This exhibition by Gil Delindro (1989, Porto) crosses the artist's path over several years, following a line of reflection on the process of vibratory hearing—a way of perceiving sounds other than through hearing sensation. This is a form of perception especially developed by deaf people, although it is accessible to practically all of us. The most recent works in the exhibition are based on research with the Deaf Community. The use of inaudible sound frequencies — infrasound, is common to most of the works in the exhibition, present in recordings made, for example, on a glacier in the Alps.

Delindro's interest in extreme natural events as turning points in cycles of creation/destruction has led him to explore a sound world that is alien to our ears and difficult to capture. In his sculptures, recordings of these inaudible soundscapes are transmitted to other materials and objects which, on the one hand, make them visible and, on the other, produce audible sounds themselves. Delindro's sound sculptures evade the interpretative factual codes of the objects through the performative action of the sound pressure he injects into the materials. This energy released by the reproduction of the recordings meets the vital vibratory essence of the bodies, radiating through them, moving them, sculpting them, simultaneously invoking a process of becoming shared by all.   

In The Vibratory Hearing, Delindro celebrates the hypersensitivity with which deaf people feel the world of sound, but also points to a world that we easily overlook: a world where the boundaries between bodies dissolve; where binary conceptions such as animate/inanimate, life/death, nature/technology are challenged; a world where we encounter the other through resonance; a world open to a whole vibratory poetry.

Pedro Rocha

Exhibition’s curator

Gil Delindro is a sound and visual artist with wide international recognition.

His interdisciplinary practice uses documentary film, installation and performance, based on field research in areas such as bioacoustics, ecology and geology.

The exhibition The Vibratory Hearing has the support of Porto City Council through the Criatório Programme.