Carles Congost

Carles Congost What Good Are Songs? TC. Music has always played a leading role in your work. CC. Music is the backbone of most of my pieces. This was even the case in my Tolo Cañellas, curator of the exhibition, and Carles Congost converse about first solo exhibition, back in 1995, curated by Manel Clot at La Capella, in Bar- the works on display at La Casa Encendida and the artist’s new video, pro- celona. The show was titled The Congosound and featured three rudimentary duced specifically for this project. videos related to new technology and club culture. The videos were accompa- nied by a series of drawings and objects that revolved around a common idea of repetition. That was in the 1990s, when few things fascinated me as much Tolo Cañellas (TC). This exhibition consists of one new production and four as music, dance and nightlife. earlier pieces. One of them, Paradigm, created in 2012, marked a narrative turning point in your work. How did that shift come about? TC. So that’s where The Congosound began? Carles Congost (CC). In the years leading up to Paradigm, I had been work- CC. Not exactly. I had already adopted the alias The Congosound sometime ing on a video trilogy with very clearly defined themes, where everything before but it was with the exhibition when it really took shape. From then on, was at the service of the story they were trying to tell. I’m talking about Un and for over a decade, it became a shared project with musician Vicent Fibla mystique determinado [A Certain Mystique] (2003), Memorias de Arkaran and with Jessie, a singular muse of the Barcelona nightlife. Working as The [Memoirs of Arkaran] (2005) and La mala pintura [Bad Painting] (2008). Congosound, we composed and produced music for my videos and for a small Everything that happens in these videos is subordinate to some kind of local label specialised in electronic music. However, over time, it became more message or statement. At the same time, the three videos try to create a and more difficult to keep that dynamic going. In 2007 I presented an instal- contrast between the stories they tell and how these are represented. The lation at the MUSAC in León called The Congosound’s Live Prototype: an au- set and staging of each video are related to a film genre or subgenre: musi- tonomous robotic stage that, theoretically, could be used to give live music cal, fantasy and horror, respectively. The constant allusions to these genres performances without leaving your house. It was meant to be an ironic com- led me to invent very elaborate, contrived images and situations that were mentary on the decline of youth bands, as well as on job obligations and time activated when speech came into play. In each video, the message was am- management once you reach your thirties. plified by the collision between those genres and the main theme: contem- After that came a long period of inactivity broken only by the release of porary art. the single Pepsi Love (Feat. Ryan Paris). It remained dormant until 2015 when, thanks to a grant from Fundación Botín, I decided to create a Catalan version TC. But in Paradigm you got rid of the dialogue. of the song Come On, by the now-defunct band Jules Tropicana, for my video Abans de la casa / Un biopic inestable a través del sonido Sabadell [Before House CC. Exactly. My approach in those videos was at odds with my photographic / An Unstable Biopic via Sabadell Sound]. At that point, I contacted the vocalist work, which is more suggestive and, paradoxically, more cinematographic. In and musician Josep Xortó. The result was the single Això que sona és nostre any case, at the time I saw this situation as a problem—you could say it even [The Sound Playing Is Ours], which became a small independent hit in Catalonia anguished me. So, a few days before shooting Paradigm, which I had initially and, thanks to the remix by producers Fred Ventura and Paolo Gozzetti (Italo- planned along the same lines as the previous videos, I exploded and decided connection), was also a modest international success among fans of New Italo. to eliminate all the dialogues and any reference to the art world. Silencing my actors shifted the focus of attention, forcing me to fall back on certain rules TC. Abans de la casa / Un biopic inestable a través del sonido Sabadell is a of cinematographic language which I hadn’t even considered up to that point. conceptual work that mixes different points of view and narrative forms, The result of this change in methodology is a suspended narrative that is for- and in which you directly refer to British artist Jeremy Deller, with whom mally richer and more open. you share a wide range of interests and concerns. What was the creative All these reflections appear in a segment of my video The Artist Behind process like? What did you intend with this work? the Aura (2014), where I retrieve the lines of dialogue eliminated from the first version of the script, which recreate an interrogation between a police CC. With Abans de la casa / Un biopic inestable a través del sonido Sabadell, officer and an abstract painter. the initial idea was to make a documentary about this mid-1980s Catalan mu- 2 3 sic phenomenon. But after some preliminary research, I realised that I didn’t comfort zone, because that phrase is far too hackneyed nowadays, but let really want to interview the true protagonists of that movement as that ap- me put it this way: what they did with me required a considerable amount of proach would lack critical detachment and irony—and I couldn’t imagine try- generosity and effort. Originally, I had planned on a more ironic, humorous ing to explain the Sabadell sound without those two ingredients. approach to the one-hit wonder phenomenon, presenting the performers of two 1980s megahits—Words and Dolce Vita—staging several comic gags on TC. So how did you decide to structure the video? a set representing the seven wonders of the modern world. I saw the two artists who were going to be featured, F.R. David and Ryan CC. I knew that I couldn’t treat it like a conventional music documentary be- Paris, as two textbook cases of one-hit wonders, but after reading the script, cause I was interested in the Sabadell sound as a symptom of a specific cul- one of them felt uncomfortable with the tone of my proposal. He made me un- tural, economic and political moment in Catalonia. So I sat down to write a derstand that some artists—not all, of course—had a problem with that term, script that would stimulate associative thinking and let me tell the story in a so I began to think about the emotional implications of coming to grips with the different way. My goal was to offer a poetic, critical look at the cultural aspi- “one-hit wonder” label. That’s when I understood that this, and no other, was rations of Catalan society at a time when the neoliberal theories of Margaret the angle truly worth exploring, as that’s the true source of the conflict. At a Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US had permeated practically certain point, I decided to stop the project and start again from scratch. every sphere of social, cultural and economic life. In 1987, the British mag- azine Smash Hits ran a lengthy interview with the British Prime Minister in TC. That same year, the curator of Manifesta 11, Christian Jankowski, invit- which Thatcher underscored the importance of music and how it inspired ed you to participate in the biennial with Simply the Best, in which a young young people to head up a profitable, exportable project. At the same time, in Swiss fireman works to organise an event in which Tina Turner is supposed Catalonia, the protest messages of older singer/songwriters were temporar- to participate. You originally wanted her to be part of the cast. Why did she ily sidelined by the eagerness of Jordi Pujol and his followers to promote the refuse? What part would she have played? idea of fem país or “building a country”. Nationalism and industry, without acrimony or hard feelings: that’s what Sabadell sound is to me. CC. The presence of a world-famous celebrity like Tina Turner in the local con- text of Zurich was certainly interesting, and it helped me illustrate some of TC. In 2016 you were able to produce Wonders, where you explore the meg- the city’s idiosyncrasies. The main theme of Manifesta 11 was labour and the ahit and one-hit-wonder phenomena through two ex-members of the band different ways we relate to it. Her case was particularly interesting so I decid- Musical Youth. What do those concepts mean to you? ed to mention it in my video. But in fact Tina Turner was just another cog in a complex mechanism of references. I did—perhaps rather naively and impul- CC. I like the idea of the megahit as something that is played every day, every- sively—sound out the possibility of a cameo. It was something both Christian where, until the end of time; songs bigger than the people who write or per- and I wanted, especially since he’s quite used to involving celebrities in his form them, melodies we are forced to live with, as they are part of our daily works.

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