This album compiles a series of sound pieces produced by the Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (Iquitos, 1933 – Lima, 2021) during the 1970s. It includes works created by the artist that were part of various artistic projects, mainly sound installations, as well as pieces commissioned to musicians and inspired by her work. This album thus embodies an approach to a sound universe that has accompanied Burga's very personal work, which has transcended the limits of the artistic medium and disciplines.

In the last decade, Teresa Burga's work has been present in numerous retrospectives and anthologies, as well as in various critical studies, which has cemented her standing in the art world, both in her home country and internationally. Indeed, she has come to be seen as one of the key figures of Peruvian conceptual and pop art of the 1960s and 1970s.

A founding member of the avant-garde art collective, Arte Nuevo, Burga began painting and then embarked on an experimental path influenced by conceptual art. Her works emphasized her status as a woman in an eminently male art scene, as well as her experience as a public worker in the national tax administration system, which familiarized her with the bureaucratic language of reports and records — a distinctive feature of her artistic style.

Her work has explored multiple mediums and the use of technological resources, which can be seen in her light installations, videos, pieces that allude to computer processes, and sound installations, highlighting the place which women occupied in a world of technological mediations.
This album includes the sound pieces Estructura Informe Corazón [Structure Informe Corazón] (1972) and 4 mensajes [4 Messages (1974)], composed of heart sounds and distorted television signals.

It also includes the interpretation of the conceptual score Esctructura Propuesta Sonido [Structure Proposal Sound I (1978)], based on the poem “Cruz y Ficción” by Blanca Varela, in versions by the Peruvian Nicolás Wageman, and by the Argentineans Alma Laprida and Alan Courtis. Also included is the piece Borges (2017), a commission by Burga to the Peruvian composer Jan Diego Malachowski, for the installation of the same name, here presented in a synthesizer version by Laprida and Courtis.

Estructura Propuesta Sonido, by Teresa Burga is presented in vinyl format, in a limited edition of 300 copies. The publication includes a booklet with extensive notes by curator and researcher Luis Alvarado, as well as extensive visual documentation. This album is published by Buh Records with the support of Proyecto AMIL, who have joined efforts to develop a collection dedicated to presenting fundamental Peruvian works that operate at the borders of visual arts and sound.

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TERESA BURGA
STRUCTURE PROPOSAL SOUND
PIECES FOR INSTALLATIONS AND COMPOSITIONS WITH RANDOM NOTES (1972-2017)

By Luis Alvarado

This album compiles a series of sound pieces produced by the Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (Iquitos, 1933 – Lima, 2021) during the 1970s. It includes works that were part of various artistic projects, mainly sound installations, as well as pieces commissioned to musicians and inspired by her work. This album thus embodies an approach to a sound universe that has accompanied Burga's very personal work, which has transcended the limits of the artistic medium and disciplines.

In the last decade, Teresa Burga's work has been present in numerous retrospectives and anthologies, as well as in various critical studies, which has cemented her standing in the art world, both in her home country and internationally. Indeed, she has come to be seen as one of the key figures of Peruvian conceptual and pop art of the 1960s and 1970s.

A founding member of the avant-garde art collective, Arte Nuevo, Burga began painting and then embarked on an experimental path influenced by conceptual art. Her works emphasized her status as a woman in an eminently male art scene, as well as her experience as a public worker in the national tax administration system, which familiarized her with the bureaucratic language of reports and records — a distinctive feature of her artistic style.

Her pieces often presented as part of complex installations and settings, could take the form of drawings or sculptures, but also diagrams, measurement reports, and statistical documentation. Burga also created “proposals” to be carried out with carefully written instructions. Some of these were left unfinished due to the lack of logistic and technical assistance or economical means to carry them out, while several others were designed as impossible or utopian projects. Her work has explored multiple mediums and the use of technological resources, which can be seen in her light installations, videos, pieces that allude to computer processes, and sound installations, highlighting the place which women occupied in a world of technological mediations.

Chance also plays an important role in her oeuvre. On the one hand, her works, question the normative logic of time, that governs ways of living and organizing, and on the other, they are based on mathematical calculations and open up a variety of possibilities for their realization.
Sound, as a physical phenomenon in time, could not escape from her interests. The first work in which she incorporated sound was Estructuras Acciones Primarias [Structures Primary Actions] (1970).
This piece was designed as a project for an experimental multimedia performance and included instructions to amplify sounds that occurred on stage, essentially those that were produced by bodily movements. The work showed Burga's interest in disrupting certain orders of attention and emphasizing the body as a place of inquiry. That same year the artist conceived a framework for a future sound installation based on the amplification of the sounds of her heart titled Sound Information. The work materialized two years later as part of Autorretrato. Estructura-Informe 9.6.72 [Self-Portrait. Structure-Report 6.9.72] which was exhibited in June 1972 in the gallery of Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Lima. This work traced a new course for local artistic production, radicalizing the features that were previously proposed by the Arte Nuevo collective the previous decade, where the aesthetic act prevailed over the aesthetic object.

Autorretrato... was an exhibition that presented a series of documents and diagrams based on the artist herself. Photographs of her face on graph paper were accompanied by biomedical information. Among the diverse material on display, was the piece Estructura Informe Corazón [Structure Report Heart], made up of an electrocardiogram and a phonocardiogram, recorded on tape that played back through an audio device wich allowed the artist's heartbeat to be heard. What was crucial, in addition to the gesture of adding sound to the gallery space, was how the sounds of the body were resignified in that context, the way they were turned into something that demands attention. In this sense, the amplified sound of the heartbeat generated questions as well as the distressing sensation of time passing by.

The work 4 mensajes [4 messages] presented in 1974, and again at the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, included random processes as well. The artist used these messages as inpunt to be reformulated and presented them in four large sections which included film, experimentation with text, photographs, and audio. According to the informative diagrams accompanying the sound section, titled Mensaje 4, made a year earlier, starting with the “extraction of the basic theme” from TV Channel 11, on December 27, 1973, at 9 pm. This recording consisted of “musical, environmental sounds and human voices” that were converted to “distorted sounds.” The final 10 minute piece was played back in a loop during the exhibition. The recording includes various sounds from television programming.It can be vaguely intuited that these sounds were extracted from newscasts and some musical presentations, and were processed with feedback techniques (for this, the artist sent the material to a recording studio) in order to erase the original source until turning it into some sort of sonic detritus. It is interesting the act of nullifying the communicational possibilities, turning the information into pure noise and presenting it to the public. This noise takes place in the gallery as a sound on the margins of what is audible and legible and gives the work a sense of embodiment. Burga seems to be trying to recover a place for sound as matter, as sensoriality.
According to curator Miguel A. López, the artist seems to be engaging in a critical dialogue with attempts to regulate content at a time when the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado threatened to take control of the media.

Many other works that included sound, remained as projects or ideas. Like, Paisaje Urbano 19… [Urban Landscape 19…] (1978-1979) which incorporated field recordings made in Lima. Burga also planned works that used telephone sets, such as Identificación [Identification] (1978), or that amplified the sound of a clock, such as Picture with a line. Likewise, she work with verbal representations, which go back to an early painting of hers titled Hastío [Weariness] (1966) where the word “Bah” appears over a female figure with a dissatisfied expression. Something similar arises in the woodcut La Boca [The Mouth] (1968) which shows, as signs of tension, the profile of a woman's face, the letter A, and a painted mouth, which suggests the subordination of women’s place of enunciation.

A piece that has gained notoriety in recent years is Estructura Propuesta Sonido I [Structure Proposal Sound I] (1978), made of three scores and based on the poem “Cruz y Ficción” a sort of play on words that translates to “Crucifixion” / “Cross and Fiction” included in Canto Villano [Villian Song], the fourth book by the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela, edited in Lima in September 1978. An assiduous reader of this author, Teresa Burga chose this poem to produce an atypical piece that consisted two assing musical notes on a score to each syllable of the poem, os it served as imput for the creation of a work. This piece was only unveiled in September 2010, as part of the retrospective exhibition Informes, Esquemas, Intervalos 17-9-2010 [Reports, Schemes, Intervals 9-17-2010], curated by Miguel A. López and Emilio Tarazona a presented at ICPNA, Lima. The show displayed this fascinating work that had remained concealed for many years. On that occasion, the three scores were exhibited together with the first recording of the piece by guitarist Nicolás Wangeman. This retrospective (including the recording) was then presented in Stuttgart in September 2011.

The exhibition Teresa Burga: Estructuras de Aire [Teresa Burga: Structures of Air], presented at MALBA in 2015, curated by Miguel A. López and Agustín Pérez Rubio, included once again the three scores. The Argentinian musicians, Alma Laprida and Alan Courtis were invited to perform the piece live, in a version for voice and acoustic guitar. In addition, the duo presented a series of electroacoustic variations as a tribute o Burga.

It should be noted that the technique used in the Estructura Propuesta Sonido I had an antecedent in the deconstruction of another poem, one by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled “La noche que en el sur lo velaron” [Deathwatch on the Southside], from 1929. If there is something in common between Borges' poem and Varela's, it is that both refer to death, which in the context of the work of the Peruvian artist, can allude to the body and its temporality. Burga's Borges (1974) included a series of visual works with titles such as Estructura 1 Fonemas: Colores al azar [Structure 1 Phonemes: Random Colors], Estructura 2: Vocablos conformados por fonemas de colores al azar [Structure 2: Words made up of randomly colored phonemes], Estructura 3: Vocablos cruzados [Structure 3: Crossed Words], and Estructura 4 Fonemas: Vocablos en el espacio colores al azar [Structure 4 Phonemes: Words in Space Random Colors]. For the elaboration of these visual works, Burga had assigned a color to each letter of the poem and with those colors, painted with markers, she built geometric images through grids, which resulted in abstract visual configurations that are equivalent to an imaginary structure of randomly suggested words. Furthermore, the work included documentation of the entire process of assigning and encoding values.

The chromatic visual construction derived from a chain of phonemes in Borges, anticipates what in Estructura Propuesta Sonido I is already an articulation of musical notes. But for the poem “Cruz y Ficción”, Burga also uses a visual version of phonemes with random colors and this reveals a constant method in which the artist deconstructs the same message in more than one possible medium, in this case in colors and in sounds. Borges was also translated into a score, based on the assignment of values to each letter, word and phrase, a work that was commissioned to the Peruvian composer Jan Diego Malachowski in 2017. That score and a MIDI recording of it, were presented as part of the entire Borges project, in the exhibition Teresa Burga: Conceptual Installations of the 70s that same year at the Gallerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin. For this album, the artists Alma Laprida and Alan Courtis, prepared a synthesizer interpretation of the score.

The use of sound in the work of Teresa Burga as part of an expansion of media, characteristic of avant-garde art in the 1970s, has had various roles. Mainly, sound acts as a manifestation of temporality, which is subjected to various amplifications and distortions, as the artist seeks to reconstitute the order of attention of the viewer. On the flip side, Burga has investigated a potential space that could be called a utopian space, something typical of the experiences of conceptual art. It is significant that the creation of scores represents a subsequent stage to the experimentation of visual pieces with random phonemes. It is as if these chains of phonemes forced the opening of another field of meaning; one made of sound, and/or composed of musical notes. In any case, Estructura Propuesta Sonido I is best understood in relation to the set of works to which the Borges project belongs and which constitutes the artist's contribution to the creative use of sound in the visual arts. She was able to define a method and a path of an interstice, which has remained as an invitation to be used, continued,and expanded.