Author: Ewan

Although many people describe Montevideo as tranquilo(especially in comparison with Buenos Aires), I wouldn’t call it quiet. Like most modern cities, the noise from street traffic is a constant presence. On the other hand, there are many other sounds too, particularly emanating from the multitude of street markets. 

Earlier this year in Edinburgh, I was working a bit on urban soundscapes, and some of that perspective found its way to me here in Montevideo. Now I know nothing about technical aspects of sound recording, but in the course of wandering around, I was suddenly struck by the difference between vision and sound in the way we relate to places. It’s totally commonplace to take photographs when we see something that strikes us. Why don’t we do the same with sounds? Why don’t we take audioclips of the sounds that arise in our environment?

So over the course of a week, I made it my mini-project to capture interesting sounds in the environment.  In the absence of anything better,  I recorded via the voice memo app on my phone, making clips of anything that caught my attention. Of course, taking audioclips is not so different from making mini-videos in the sense that you are engaging with a process that unwinds over time, rather than capturing a single instant.  But the fact that the sound is the only thing you are recording somehow makes all the difference. 

A second big difference with photos comes in the quality of the recording. Most phone cameras now are pretty good and it rarely seems worth the bother to carry around a traditional camera. By contrast, I found it pretty hard to get decent audio recordings on my phone — not surprising, given that the microphone is optimised to pick up a voice right close-by while minimising background noise. 

After a week of this, my next step was to create a small ‘album’ of the sounds I’d recorded. Because of the poor quality of the recordings, I moved even further outside my comfort zone by doing some minimal editing of the clips on GarageBand, since this was already installed on my laptop. The practice of listening to the clips multiple times, while ruthlessly pruning away what seemed extraneous, created a sense of familiarity and affection for them: each time I played a particularly clip, it would evoke memories and feelings about where I was at the time. 

However, I’m also conscious of the fact that this evocation of the time and place via sound is very subjective. I’ve added a few photographs which relate to the some the audioclips, though there are a lots of missing places.

One of the audioclips was a snatch of song being played on someone’s radio, audible through an open door. It somehow tickled my curiosity and with the help of Shazam, I identified as Quién Eres Tu by Frank Reyes. A very cheesy song, but one that I have come to love.

The significance of graffiti and street art has been much discussed. It is striking how many of the walls in Montevideo are covered with one or the other; in fact, often both at the same time. Maybe they spring from similar impulses, where creativity and rebellion vie for our attention. Painting walls offers one of the few opportunities for citizens to visibly alter the fabric of the built environment.

Time for a confession: I don’t really like most of the graffiti that I come across here. Even stronger, it often feels to me as a disfigurement of the urban environment. That said, I’m more sympathetic to expressions of political desires (often around environmental issues or gender equality) than to tagging.

So far, I haven’t seen much of a pattern in where graffiti ends up, though obviously it helps to have a large expanse of light-coloured wall. Just opposite our co-working space (Sinergia Cowork Palermo) is a large building that houses the Universidad de Trabajo de Uruguay (UTU) — a kind of technical college. It boasts a large expanse of grey wall which has received much attention from local graffitistos. I’m inclined to think that a lot of them are disaffected UTU students.

There seems to be continuum from pure graffiti to out-and-out art. The following tranche of photos starts at the graffiti end:

By contrast, this next tranche flows more into the world of art (some of it carried out by artists’ collectives):