A line array is, by definition, a sound diffusion device designed to meet the demands of large concert halls: loudspeaker columns suspended in a vertical line, capable of projecting voice and music with power, clarity and homogeneity over large audiences. It is a technology that seeks efficiency associated with scale, with the promise of acoustic perfection.
João Pimenta Gomes appropriates this industrial object to radically shift it from its context. He transports the monumental column to the intimate space of the Cisterna. The columns are transformed into sculptures – mismatched and disproportionate. And in this almost absurd gesture, the interval of fragility, experience and power opens up.
A sound artist seeks the purity of sound, working on it almost obsessively, sheltered by the hermetic protection of studios. When this sound encounters rooms that are not prepared to receive it – as the Cistern -, it becomes contaminated with dirt, invisible interference and the technical imperfections of the walls and the cables. Everything that acoustic engineering tries to hide becomes visible and audible here. It is in this confrontation that the works of João Pimenta Gomes reside, with an almost punk attitude and attempting a deconstruction of the premises of musical creation. The work lives in this confrontation with the “impurities” that the system inevitably produces, accepting and incorporating real constraints — technical, economic, material.
The compositions that these columns present originate from recordings of human voices on the Mellotron, the first analogue sampler in the history of music and one of the instruments that Pimenta Gomes has been exploring. Each note, recorded on an eight-second magnetic tape, is reactivated, manipulated and reconfigured in the studio. The playback system also imposes its own agency: it cuts frequencies, limits ranges and alters timbres. The piece is never static, never stable; the device depurifies the composition and keeps it in a state of permanent variation.
This way of working is close to the logic of the archive and photography: sounds stored, revisited, selected, combined at the moment of exhibition. For the artist, the studio is a domestic space where he composes and accumulates; it is only in the exhibition installation that the encounter between material and work takes place, always revealing something unexpected. The photograph accompanying the installation neither illustrates nor explains the sound sculpture; instead, it adds layers, diverts readings, almost like an album cover — simultaneously revealing and opaque.
Line Array is thus a work about power and its impossibility, about promised purity and inevitable contamination, about noise as a vital condition. At the intersection between concert and installation, between sound archive and sculpture, between industrial promise and artisanal precariousness, the artist proposes an experience that returns sound to us in its most essential form: its vulnerability and its instability.

Filipa Oliveira