QUIPUS, for STRING QUARTET (2012)
Composer: Juan Arroyo
Violin 1: Pauline Klaus
Violin 2: Florent Billy
Viola: Élodie Gaudet
Cello: Marie Ythier
Audio recording: Linda Bujoli
Photo: Kamir Meridja

Live performance in November 25, 2022 at Festival Sonomundo by Ensemble Regards

QUIPUS, for string quartet

The pieces presented for the Trees exhibition draw visitors attention to the beauty of the knots on the trees in Cannizaro Park and suggests that they might be read as symbols.  

Weaving is central to my creative practice, inspired by my Argentinian and Bolivian heritage. My work explores memory and place through weaving and walking  I draw on Incan history and the Quechua language of the native Andean people. In particular I use ‘Quipu’ (knot work) an ancient and nuanced form of communication used by indigenous communities living in the Andes Mountains of South America.

I have annotated my experience of walking amongst the trees in the park through two wall sculptures, Time Waits and Magnificent in Decay. The wall sculptures are quipu poems (written with  knots). Their weaving is inspired by the knots in the trees in the surrounding parkland . In the wall sculptures the quipus represent phonetic information, a score, sheet music, in knots.

Magnificent In Decay, 2024 a quipu poem

Juan ARROYO
www.juan-arroyo.com
Photo by Kamir Meridja

Composer in residence at the Center Henri Pousseur (2014), IRCAM (2015), member of the Academy of France in Madrid-Casa de Velazquez (2016/17), composer in residence at the Art Zoyd Music Creation Center, member of the Académie de France in Rome-Villa Médicis for the year 2017/18, he is actually composer in residence at the National Orchestra of Peru.

Juan Arroyo was born in Lima, Peru. He studied composition at the Conservatories of Lima, Bordeaux and at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris. He deepens his musical knowledge in formations like Voix Nouvelles and the IRCAM. He has been guided by eminent composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, Heinz Holliger, Henri Pousseur, Mauricio Kagel, Michael Levinas, Luis Naón and Stefano Gervasoni.

His music is rewarded with numerous awards such as the prize of the Salabert Foundation (2013) and the prize of the Academy of Fine Arts of France (2015). He receives prestigious commissions from the French Ministry of Culture, Radio France, Centre Henri Pousseur, SACEM, Proxima Centauri and Tana string quartet. His works are performed by eminent musicians such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, L’Itinéraire, Linea, LAPS, L’Arsenale, Regards, Sonido Extremo, Orquesta Nacional de Perú, Vertixe Sonora, Claude Delangle, Jeanne Maisonhaute, Antonio Politano and Maribé Charrier. His music is performed at great festivals such as Ars Musica, Cervantino, La Chaise-Dieu, Ensems and ¡Viva Villa!

His work of composition is articulated around the Magical Sound Realism through the different techniques of sound hybridization. In fact, in 2014, he began a fundamental stage of his artistic work with the construction of new instruments capable of transmuting his sound, the TanaInstruments. This allowed him to hybridize the perceptual indices of sounds in order to reveal their evocative and irrational nature of their substance, sometimes making them enigmatic.

The uniqueness of his work lies in these games of displacement, of movement between a causal listening and a reduced listening, passing through many intermediate states of perception. Juan Arroyo explores these different degrees gradually blurring the sources of sound in the manner of a photographer or cameraman, making us travel from the concrete to the abstract, from materiality to immateriality, playing with the configuration of its objective.

#ThreadandWord is a performative walking practice led by artist Elspeth Penfold  in collaboration with invited artists,  academics and community groups.
These walks develop through chosen events and extend a walking practice through performative engagement which responds to a chosen event with artists, community groups and the landscape. The process in creating the walk can take a number of months to develop and new ideas and encounters emerge along the way. It is fun and we all enjoy the journey. This page records the process of each walk as it develops.

New tracks tagged #quipus