PULSO Y MARTILLO

By eliminating the border between performers and art audiences, PULSO Y MARTILLO engages the immigrant and artist communities simultaneously in order to initiate an act of audience re-construction, towards the inclusion of unacknowledged entities. The lively spectacle is unveiled through its duration and compositional elements: sound, motion, memory, form, and pulse.

The performers, mostly immigrant students, position themselves around a wooden platform and pound sledgehammers onto thick copper plates, producing new rhythms, meters, and voices. The sound performance deals with a layering of memories, as it is through memory that one addresses the loss or distortion of the disappearing cultural traditional crafts in Mexico; in PULSO Y MARTILLO, this loss and distortion is specifically related to the copper production ritual in Santa Clara Del Cobre, Michoacan. PULSO Y MARTILLO’s variations include full strong circular hammer strokes, hammer sweeps, hammer rests, bounce strokes, hammer brushes, and quiet pulses.

Video of Feb 5, 2011 performance at UCR Sweeney Art Gallery