Espacio Contemporáneo-Radio Taxi Buenos Aires

Curatorial text

This project has its point of departure in the first travel of sound artist Maia Urstad to Buenos Aires –as a resident of URRA in 2014-. During her stay, she became interested in the habits and customs of the city. She was especially struck by the sound of the Buenos Aires' radio taxis; it appeared to her as a characteristic but also somehowrecognizable sound universe, with its steady stream of messages, beeps, crackles and interruptions. The sound reminded her of something she had forgotten and that she was not quite sure when disappeared from her sound world.

The communication between the approximately 38.000 radio taxis circulating the city of Buenos Aires and their central, is passed on via radio and VHF transmitters –a system that her home country Norway has exchanged by silent digital computer technology and SMS. Throughconversations with different people during her stay in Buenos Aires, she had the impression that nearly every porteño has a relation to the radio taxi, that the sound is in his or her spine, so to speak, as part of the central nervous system of the city, and as an important part of the Buenos Aires' sonic identity.

Maia then turned into an investigator almost anthropologist and started exploring the Radio Taxi phenomenon. She learnt that there is also another communication between lines of the taxi drivers, which is out of reach from the common passenger: the intonation, the flirting, the addresses, the hints, forbidden commentaries and secret signals.

This work goes about the Language and its history: the peculiarity of the art is to transform the ordinary into special, therefore, what you are listening tonow has its origin in something that we have hearduntil weariness, but which through the work of the artist, becomes something quite singular. The work of Maia Urstad questions how we communicate, what we use and what we dismiss from what we hearevery day. Makes an emphasis over what is hidden in language and over what we assimilate with no need of being explicit: the same way as it happens in the language of the taxi drivers, it happens to us as citizens -we take away our attention from what we have already learnt. Hence, this piece invites us to give back the curiosity to what we left behind, to what we may have forgotten; it maybe also helps us to understand that beyond technology, there is still us, that maybe, it is not urgent to exchange our analogic core to convert into totally digital, that we can still talk in million different ways and understand between the noises and sounds of reality what cannot be written in an SMS.

Javier Aparicio

This project is supported by: