The prevalence of certain objects over others, and of what is tactile visually/visually tactile over the rest, is one of the foundations of archaeology, an area that seeks to trace the path and evolution of humanity and its “History” - phallogocentric, white, Eurocentric , and still debilitatingly imagery and objectual. Thus, in the urgency of (re)thinking what history is, and what certain narratives can be, at the intersection of all these cumulative oppressions, it is also important to question the way in which human perception, despite being dependent on social contexts, economic, and cultural, is still altered by the constraints of the body itself, here (and always) the object of mediation between consciousness and reality. To understand the real as the intersection between the in/visible and the in/visible is to understand how the human perception of this same real is necessarily constrained by hierarchies and structural inequalities, which extend to the senses, where the visual and the haptic are situated in the top, which implies that the rest are relegated to a secondary plane of consciousness. This hierarchy, like all others, is mirrored in the construction of archives, and what is commonly characterized as “historical”.

This premise is found in the theoretical and critical genesis of the artistic creation of Andreia Santana, who has been working, since 2016, in the most varied ways, the diffuse field of memory - between what is forgotten and what is remembered (I do it here even the note of the symmetry between remembering, which in Portuguese means remembering, and “record”, which in English means recording, usually associated with sound recordings) - and especially thinking about the processes that legitimize and control what should or should not be remembered. The works that make up the exhibition “Sonic Materialities”, created specifically for the homonymous project and for the ARTES space, appear in the continuity of Andreia Santana's thinking about the ways of producing collective memories, archives and Histories, and the systems that reiterate the their validity, continuities and violence. This one

thought, which informs his work in a continuous and increasingly deeper way, is discovering new layers of meanings and narratives that have been systematically abandoned in favor of a historical and theoretical cohesion that allowed, for a long time, the maintenance of an iniquitous society that even today it remains violently unequal.

Through the score-drawings of the musician, composer and graphic designer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981), Santana works on the symbiotic relationships between sound, music, and the visual arts, drawing sound in the three-dimensional space of the visible, giving it a physical body which is then translated again into the field of sound - and questioning, during this process, a sovereign hierarchy of the senses, where the idea of ​​a sonic materiality (or a materialized sound) comes to assume the field of the sensitive as fickle and transmutable , sculpted only by the (pre)concepts that limit us. Objectuality also becomes a characteristic of sound waves, and Andreia Santana gives body (and the space it occupies) to the invisible, showing that the form of sound and the sound of form are inseparable, as are our sensitivity and its readings of the real, through the almost alchemical process that translates chaos into stimuli.

The relationship between sound and matter is something that has long accompanied Andreia Santana's work in a tangent way: the materials and dimensions that the artist manipulates are typical of a factory environment, where the hard work of manual and machinery is accompanied by the sounds of mechanical repetition of object creation, a process that he closely follows and in which he often participates. 

The intervals of the sound, marked by the ringing of the bell, bring the momentary interruption of the tasks - and, like a guided silence, they extend for a defined number of bars until the new note that starts the fundamental process of capital. Complicating the reflection between the sculpting movements and the movement of inscription and musical conduction, the hands, which Santana draws gracefully, are the tactile medium that produces both the hardness of the object and the lightness of its sound, which handles industrial tools in the construction of a sculpture or conducts an orchestra in its interpretation of a score, but which always encourages the creation and visibility of other objects (even ignoring their historical inscription).

Dissolving the barrier between the interior and exterior of the gallery (which can serve as a metaphor for the private/public spatial binomial), the artist Francisco Antão intervenes in the windows of the ARTES space, with an original composition, created especially to accompany the artist's sculptures. . This sound layer works like an echo that reaches the outside, invading the environment that surrounds the exhibition and allowing other readings not conditioned by the institutionality of the exhibition space - mirroring political processes that not onlyaddressed the issues of manual work, work and its value, but also rethought the issues of accessibility to culture and knowledge (and its democratization).

Finally, and as in all artistic actions (and, hopefully, critical) we must be aware of new meanings and updates, with the exception of a whole new context that was not present when this project was created. Sonic Materialities was not designed to run parallel to a calamity like the covid pandemic, but its very structure allows the dematerialization of ways of relating and interacting, by emphasizing sound as a multi-disciplinary and multifaceted medium, allowing personal and interpersonal communication. , in close proximity and at a distance, here (and now) or in the cloud. Where an attempt was made to rethink how sound can take a haptic form so that it can (co-)exist in a historical archive of objects, and if this consubstantiation is indeed necessary, it is now also necessary to think about how the object can be translated into the sonorous - and how this process allows (although not yet free of problems in the field of accessibility) a construction of democratic thinking and free access, opening the way for other ways of seeing, hearing and knowing that contain in themselves countless possibilities to shake the foundations of the hegemonic.