Cu (2015)

Encargo radiofónico creado para el programa Soundproof de la radio pública australiana ABC, y curado bajo el nombre de Remote Series por Anna Friz and Konrad Korabiewski.

El Teniente is the world’s largest underground copper mine, located in Cachapoal Province in the Chilean Andes, 7,500 feet above sea level. The mine has been in operation since 1819, and boasts 3000 kilometres of tunnels and more than 10,000 workers. At the mine’s surface is the ghost town of Sewell, a place where the mine workers lived during the past century until the 1970s, but underneath copper (or Cu on the periodic table of elements) is still being extracted as the primary export and pillar of the Chilean economy.

Cu is the second episode of the five-part Remote Series. Chilean sound artist Fernando Godoy was given permission to record El Teniente for three days. He spent one day outside the mine, recording the ‘concentration plant’: a chain of non-stop working machines where the mineral is transported, depurated and ground into little pieces, and two days inside on level 5 (of 8 levels total), where the mineral is transported by an extensive internal train which loads and unloads rocks via the mine’s complex network of tunnels.

Godoy’s acoustic experience of the mine was marked by the repetitive and constant sound of machinery but also by the sound of rocks, metal, the drone of tunnels, its electricity system and the low frequencies of sounds traveling through the tunnels. Cu was made exclusively with mine field recordings, with no sound manipulation during the composition except equalization and layering.

Texto tomado del sitio web de Soundproof

Fotos de Rodrigo Rios Zunino.