Tales from the Mountaintop / Adrian Melis (CU/ES), Photo: tom mesic

Tales from the Mountaintop

Adrian Melis (CU/ES)

Tales from the Mountaintop is a three-channel sound performative audiovisual work in collaboration with people who live in extreme poverty and sociopolitical disenchantment in different parts of the island of Cuba, mostly in the vicinity of the mountains of the Sierra Maestra: a place located in the east of Cuba loaded with a historical connotation in the 1950s for being the battlefield and conquest of the Cuban Revolution.

From the confines of their homes, inhabitants of these regions were invited to reproduce the soundscape of what was once a glorious journey through the mountains made by Castro’s guerrillas. By using Foley Art (a technique used in cinema to reproduce sounds absent from our environment) each person was invited to create specific sounds from the objects and materials found in the rubble and garbage dumps where they live. The sequences of sounds responded to key moments of such heroic battle. A glorious battle that can only emerge from the garbage and ruins of the present times.

Credits

I want to credit all the participants who performed and gave shape to this project.

Photo: Adrian Melis

Adrian Melis (CU/ES)

Adrian Melis is a multidisciplinary artist based in Cuba and Europe. He is a former resident of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2014/2015). He has exhibited in several museums and institutions around the world, such as Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland); Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (Poland); Wiels Brussels (Belgium); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); Pinchuk Art Center (Kyiv, Ukraine); Pori Art Museum (Pori, Finland); De Appel Center (Amsterdam, The Netherlands); Queens Museum (New York, USA), Rotterdam Film Festival (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) and the 10th Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai, China). Since 2010 he has been represented by ADN Galería (Barcelona, Spain) where two of his solo shows were awarded by GAG (MACBA) His work is in private and public collections, including Pori Art Museum (Finland); MAS Santander (Spain); MACBA Barcelona (Spain); Collection Alain Servais (Belgium); Collection Lemaître (France); Collection A. de Galbert (France) and Collection Teixeira de Freitas (Portugal).