"I am a narcissist"This is the title of the opera that won young Catalan composer Raquel García-Tomás the National Music Prize in the "composition" category in 2020. In March 2023, she will premiere her new opera Alexina B at Barcelona's Liceu. She will be the second woman to create an opera at the Liceu in 175 years! The Mixtur festival and Paysages Humains have teamed up again to commission her work, Sightings, to be presented in Barcelona on October 7, 2022.

Sightings is an original piece commissioned by the Mixtur Festival , the Ramon Llull Foundation and Hémisphère Son, and performed by the young German ensemble Via Nova. It was conceived by Raquel García-Tomás with filmmaker and illustrator Pere Ginard.

Raquel Garcia Tomás and Pere Ginard answer a few questions from Txema Seglers, our correspondent in Barcelona, about this new collaboration...

Tell me, both of you, how did this collaboration begin? Pere?
Pere: We met at the Auditori, in 2016, around a project called Històries Elèctriques. They contacted us through different channels and for different purposes: me to propose live animations during the show, and Raquel to compose the themes.
Raquel: Mixtur commissioned me to create a work with video. I thought about it and contacted Pere, with whom I'd already worked "off-line", as he'd put images on one of my works after the fact. But for Sightings (premiered at Weimar's Kunstfest on September 5, editor's note), as the piece was in concert format, we began to work in a different way, seeking a dialogue between the two disciplines. 

And how did you go about working together?
Pere: I started assembling images and preparing a script based on the imaginary world of underwater myths, which I've already told you seduce and fascinate me.

Mermaids, giant squids...?
Pere: Yes, yes, monsters, newts and a long etcetera.
Raquel: Exactly. I'd never worked with filmmakers or video artists before. The interest of this project with Pere was to rethink the process we were building. I'm a perfectionist, and until something convinces me, I don't move on. In this work, however, it was the other way round, as Pere presented me with images that weren't yet definitive, so that I could move on, like an open-ended, back-and-forth process. We fed off each other.

Interesting.
Raquel: Yes, we're talking about a work with live music, although there is a pre-recorded electronic base. In cinema, we normally work the other way round: first we concentrate on the images, then on the soundtrack. But, in this creation, everything had to be quantified in a tempo; that's why everything happens to the second, it's synchronized. If Pere had first introduced images, and then I had composed the music to link them, perhaps the instrumentalists wouldn't have been able to intuitively follow the rhythm Pere proposed. So the simplest thing to do was to first propose a sound discourse with chords, and then Pere worked on the basis of these chords, synchronizing them to facilitate the work of the performers.  

And how do you want the public to receive this work?
Raquel: While it's true that the aesthetic of this creation is dark, it's also light and fresh. In fact, it can be seen as fun, a slightly strange story that arouses amusement, healthy curiosity and noble perplexity.
Pere: Yes, I agree. From the third minute, we know we're witnessing a story of explorers. However, the meaning of this quest, whatever it may be, is much more open-ended.

Photos © May Zircus
Photos © Raquel Garcia Tomás