Extraclasse, or How to Survive the "Deaf Times"[1]  

What sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? (...) 

Clairaudience, not muffled ears. 

R. Murray Schafer, 1998. 

First Notation 

Generative Situations 

In 2016, Luiz Olivieri began the process of fabulation for what would become this exhibition. More  than being an exhibition of works, what we see is a set of complex ideas and procedures, matured  during the development of his doctoral thesis, completed in 2021.[2] 

Among the actions that make up the project were the artistic-pedagogical exercises activated during  the time he was a teacher in the public education system of the Federal District. As an artist-teacher,  Olivieri envisioned the school as a possible space to practice alternative ways of being a teacher— not fixed to the classroom as the space par excellence for teaching practice, and not bound by the  protocols that relate teaching to the mandatory learning of prue-determined content to meet  universal goals, which tend to silence plurivocality. 

In assuming the role of art teacher, Olivieri brought into the school environment a central question  in his artistic poetics since 2008: sonority, which in this context, was triggered as part of a pedagogy  of listening, in search of sound resonances, established to give way to the auditory perception of  different frequencies, noises, and silences. To listen to these various sonorities, the artist Olivieri  took on, at times, the position of a foreign teacher, and at other times, that of a spy-teacher. 

Various points of listening were established in the schools Olivieri worked with, resulting in the  pieces we see in this show. The teaching experiences, often hardened by the occurrences of  everyday school life, became objects of art through the artist's insistence on making his listening of  the world hedonistic, a process he named sondiagem (sounding), or a strategy to overcome the  deafening caused by a society that imprisons listening and prevents us from experiencing liberating  experiences. 

Second Notation

Trans-Sonic Objects/ Experimental Art at Issue 

It is difficult to assert, for the purposes of the Extraclasse exhibition, which came first: the sound,  the object, or the pedagogy. And perhaps this indeterminacy is the guiding thread for discussing this  project. To admit that different frequencies coexist in the sonic landscape that constitutes the  constructive space where Olivieri’s investigation and poetics take place is to realize that sound is  not from anywhere, but is also from everywhere. One could say, with this in mind, that sonority is a  condition present in life, and that soundscapes integrate existence, even though they often pass  unnoticed, submerged under the overwhelming and pervasive dominance of visual fields. 

When Olivieri, as an art teacher, begins to interrelate his practices as an artist with his role as a  teacher, his perception of the space where education occurs expands (a space that encompasses  teachers, students, staff teams, the physical space of the school, and its material resources). The  

school becomes a place for singular listenings, which become pedagogies, with art as the means to  make the invisible visible. It is no coincidence that the Extraclasse series (2019-2020) [p.XX]  names the exhibition, indicating a pedagogical path where sound becomes sonic representation— meaningful image—that overflows the confines of the classroom, crosses the school walls, and  enters the personal life of each student. The students act as archaeologists of sonorities, capturing  sounds through listening and mentally collecting those that seem recurrent to them, and then  bringing the sounds back to the classroom to share and translate. What is the sound of the wind that  carries all kinds of things? 

Reflecting on the invisibility of sound may seem a futile and ill-advised task, as it seems obvious  that sound, when emitted, is an immaterial element and imperceptible to the eyes. The fact is that,  even in its immateriality, sound exists. One of the challenges is to conjecture how it propagates and  what effects it causes, which, in the case of Olivieri’s body of work for this exhibition, is an  exercise to which we are compelled, because it takes us to the effective field of experimentation in  art. 

The experimental data is fundamental to interacting with Olivieri’s sonic universe. This is true both  because the niche of Sound Art[3] (as a movement in art)—around which the artist moves— emerged historically in the 1970s, a time of artistic experimentation par excellence. This does not  mean disregarding earlier moments in which sound was activated as part of an artwork, such as the  works of Dadaists and Futurists in the 1920s (we can cite the sound juxtaposition experiments  carried out by the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) and notable incursions by some artists in the  1950s and 1960s, such as John Cage, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, Yoko Ono, among others. But 

it does mean saying that it was during that time that a body of experiences around sound began to  take shape or became recognized as a broader, more generalized fact, giving a name to a field of  work for the visual arts. In that phase, artistic practices and productions interacted less with the  study of the aesthetic and material properties of the object as the pinnacle of analysis, and sought to  engage more with "moments and the construction of situations"[4]. 

The attention to the transient, to the place, and to the issues arising from this focus on temporality  and surroundings became central for the development of new ideas in art and its production,  emerging as responses of discontent with a system of beliefs and consolidated social, cultural, and  economic bases, long unsatisfactory for addressing a critical present, which, globally, was  awakening in the 1970s to feminism, ecology, technology and its implications for everyday life,  institutionalism, and many other issues that began to shape a new scenario. A scenario that, in order  to be and remain as alterity in the present, would have to be attentive to avoid reproducing  institutional mechanisms that promote radically stable positions, and not encourage the idea of the  immutability of the subject. A solution would be to try to establish something closer to “contingent  foundations”[5], or non-absolutist formations compatible with the increasing instability of the world  and the subjective uncertainties. 

Third Notation 

Soundscapes Exist; They Are Interwoven with the Fabric of the World. Listening to Them is  an Act of Re-signification of Being. 

In addition to the idea of contingency, it would be important to add another: that of hybridity, as a  condition of transformation arising from the mixings that occur when fields and narratives intersect.  From this, we begin to weave elements for the formation of the terrain of Sound Art and, in this  way, approach the works that make up the Extraclasse exhibition (Lousa, Cacofonias, Topofonias,  Eletrocardiograma, the Extraclasse series, and Ponto de Escuta). This set, when appreciated, leads  us to a territory where sound does not seem to be the privilege of one field of knowledge or another,  and assumes singular materialities depending on the focus, determined by the interest of the artist or  researcher. 

Olivieri emphasizes the possibilities of coexistence between fields, when he designs and constructs  gadgets that produce sounds and textualities, combined with materialities and resources—desks,  chairs, blackboards, graphs—items that are naturalized as exclusive property of the school  environment. This is because talking about Sound Art as part of a set of manifestations in  contemporary art means incorporating mixtures and intersections, such as we see in the constitution 

of musique concrète[6], where the practice of collaging recorded and/or manipulated acoustic and  electronic sounds configures the structures. 

While musique concrète[7] focuses on the study of the sonic properties of objects, their physical  properties, and the technologies involved in the process (similar to the aesthetic and formal studies  of a work of art); soundscapes emerge as an expanded field of research in the 1970s, referring to the  space as the place that accommodates the relationships between things and people (listeners). The  Canadian Murray Schafer, who propelled studies on the subject, defines the soundscape as an  “acoustic field of study” that seeks a sonic ecology capable of revealing the relationships between  living beings and their environment. This idea, in a way, aligns with the idealization of a site specific art project, where the environment transforms into a location to give way to an idea or a  situation. 

In his thesis, Olivieri relates the school to the soundscape and the artist residency, proposing a kind  of methodology for being in this other school, guided by art and sounds, which he calls sondiagem (sounding), an investigation into space and the condition of self based on a hedonistic listening,  motivated and dedicated to pleasure. The conception of the educational space as an art residency  leads us to think about the meanings of learning, its contents, and methods. The term residency equates to “land” and “place of origin,” leading us to another aspect of the situation presented by  the artist: the connection to the pedagogical space as a space of belonging and identity. 

Although each of the objects and installations that Olivieri conceptualizes is singular in its  production conditions and materialities, as well as individual in its expectations of results and  reception, when gathered in the same space, within a project, they combine and transform to create  a perceptual environment, where the works speak, conversing; in this case, giving way to the desire  to expose the experiences of an artist as a teacher in the Brazilian public education system. 

The work Eletrocardiograma (2021) [p.xx] exposes, in the form of graphs, rhythmic activities,  universal and particular; absolute and relative, of the Brazilian educational reality, placing side by  side indices that depict the results of statistical research on basic education in Brazil (the historical  series produced by INEP from 1988-2020), and Olivieri's observations about his school routine, and  his reactions to it. Audio recordings are made available to the viewer, accompanying the progress of  bars that cross the graphs over time, sonifying an experience that would be purely visual if read  exclusively. The universal and absolute (macro data) indicate a larger context analyzing  enrollments, failures, and dropouts, while the particular and relative (micro data) point to subjective  markers that inhabited Olivieri’s practice and experience in schools, becoming signposts for issues 

about school lunches, the negative effects caused by the current conditions offered to teachers by  the educational system, and also indications of emotional levels during his contact with students in  the classroom. 

Fourth Notation 

When matter turns into sound. When sound turns into word. 

The Extraclasse exhibition is, in many ways, the sonification of occurrences in the daily life of a  school, or rather, it is the perception of someone who “sees sounds” in the matter, in places where  the sonic plurality is muffled by habitual patterns of hearing. As Olivieri himself declares: “(...) I  imagined how my students could use listening to explore and create places. I would like them to  listen to more than they heard, to understand more about territories and sound fields.”[8] The object  is activated to find another place, to break free from its condition of immutability, to transcend the  dimension of common understanding to which it is connected due to its functional purpose, as is the  case with the school desk surface, the material base of the installations Cacofonias (2019-2021)  [p.xx] and Topofonia (2021) [p.xx]. 

The reversal of the life of objects that Olivieri provokes is part of a constructive process typical of  contemporary art, where the materialities available in the world are rearranged, actions epitomized  by the readymade or the "found object" of Marcel Duchamp. When Duchamp created his first  readymade in 1913, he also ventured into the sound universe, designing some musical pieces and  sound apparatuses; some of them he called “musical sculptures,” while others were aligned with the  world of readymades, such as the small "piggy bank" or "can," which materialized in 1916, titled À  Bruit Secret or Secret Noise [9], containing an object that produces a sound which the artist intends  to remain unidentified, and whose impossibility of recognition is emphasized by being enclosed  inside a roll of twine placed between two copper plates screwed together, with letters painted on the  top of each, forming incomplete words whose meaning is unknown. A cryptographic work where  sound is part of the enigma. 

If we situate Olivieri’s sound objects within the framework of the readymade tradition, we could  categorize them as found and rectified objects, or those that undergo the artist’s intervention,  producing new semantic relations by merging distinct narratives. This other semantic order of  Olivieri’s objects occurs, facilitated by their "low-tech" aspect, which, in contrast to "high-tech"  associated with digital technology, is not the vehicle: the work itself is what carries the process, the  technique, the method. It allows the artist greater autonomy over the productive process because,  unlike digital apparatuses, which already have a predetermined functional purpose, the technology 

involved here serves the artistic experience, resulting in a type of reception that is closer to the  viewer, making the set of experiences with the object unique and unrepeatable. 

Among the six works in the exhibition, Topofonia (2021) [p.xx] is the one that most emphasizes  sound in its conceptual and cryptic manifestation. Even though its Gestalt evokes the image of a  classroom, its type of sound, detached from the significance of a textuality that gives it a defined  form, scrambles the meanings of listening because it is not directly linked to writing that gives it  concreteness. The installation consists of a set of desk surfaces, hollowed out in the center to make  

room for speakers, hung at different heights and arranged linearly, following the usual classroom  organization. The installation is paired with tracks that project a sonar-like sound which becomes  higher or lower depending on the height of the desk surfaces. The senses of identity, collectivity,  and difference are arranged there, both as an idea and as a metaphor. The noise is the voice. Each  desk could be someone, each sound a voice. 

There is a kind of magical transformation of matter that correlates the visible/invisible pair to the  extent that sound is presented through the materialization of an object that embodies it. In the  artist’s process, listening to the soundscape brings out frequencies that are inaudible to untrained  ears, unless one consciously proposes to engage in attentive listening. The process of grafar-gravar,  a term Olivieri uses to name his understanding that writing can be a form of recording, gives shape  to the installation Cacofonias (2019-2021) [p.xx] which, like the Extraclasse series, is part of a  teaching and learning process proposed by the artist-teacher, developed in the educational time space. For this work, an expanded listening was proposed, with the school as its territory. 

Fifth Notation 

Fissures generate sound pedagogies 

The works Lousa (2021) [p.xx] and Cacofonia: disco (2021) [p.xx] form a pair related to the set of  strategic listening acts in the school, making up a project called Cacofonias Escolares (2019-2021).  These works take on different aspects, relating to the synesthesia that Olivieri perceives as a quality  

of the school atmosphere. From the combinations of sensations available in this soundscape, the  artist develops his didactic path. There is no 'one school,' no singular speech or unison, even though  there is a whole system aimed at establishing and enforcing universality as a norm. 

Olivieri has a statement regarding his motivations for making these works, which should be  highlighted due to its connection with the foundations of school reality. His observation is the  omnipresence of the antithetical pair “effort-frustration,” combined with various pedagogical 

actions that occur in daily school life. In the context of Brazilian education, effort translates into an  eternal attempt to get it right, which often leads to failure, to lack, to inadequacy. In the frustrated  search for wholeness, in the excessive instrumentalization of lessons, which silences much  divergent thinking, the singularity of human inventiveness is overlooked. If considered, this  inventiveness could lead to another type of educational collectivity. 

Olivieri positions himself as a listener in the school, and comes to consider fissures as persistent  presences and places of knowledge generation. Among these fissures is the inability to see, rendered  invisible by the excessive, indelible writings on the surface of the school blackboard, which overlap  and form stains on the surface, much like palimpsests – scrolls that were written on, washed, and  scraped to make room for a new text. Since every mistake can lead to a new success, Olivieri, in the  role of artist-teacher, noticing how frustrating it was to attempt to make the text visible under those  conditions, reorients his practice, embracing the failure, translated by the desperate – and  impossible – attempt to make readable a content that ends up, as Olivieri points out in his thesis, as  “empty words (Jacques Lacan)” or “hollow words (Paulo Freire).” 

To this category of words, Olivieri adds another, which characterizes his awareness of this chaotic  outpouring of sounds, which he calls "cacophonic words," a term used to present a type of  communication very different from the ordered sound that is assumed to be present in the  educational context. In some moments, this communication may be driven by passive speech, by  compulsory silencing, and by authoritative voices. Other voices circulate, unpredictable,  uncontrollable, and inaudible, because they exist in other registers, and the artist captures them:  about everyday habits, desires, opinions, and questions. Olivieri, as the listening teacher, proposes  to hear them and transform them into narrative texts (Cacofonias I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII). 

In the work Lousa [p.xx], Olivieri records, on an extensive greenish surface, the overlapping  speeches (Cacofonia I) heard on multiple occasions during his time at school, emitted by various  agents. Just as on the school blackboard from which it originates, the viewer becomes frustrated  when attempting to read what is recorded, as only a few words are legible. Most words blur in the  hum of the graphic mass, becoming unreadable due to their overlap. The portions of text that can be  read resonate in the collective memory as something already experienced, suggesting there may be  something in what is obscured by the overlap that is already known, which could again become an  enigma if we consider the graphic stain that obscures the meaning of the text and its legibility on the  Lousa as a painting, an optical illusion created by distance.

The cacophonies generate ambiguities, and the school system, in structuring its materialities for its  proper functioning, tries to avoid them at all costs by ordering the spaces and making them uniform.  However, just as humans are fallible and finite, so too is matter, which decays and suffers human  interference: school desks are drawn on, scratched, and chipped. The memories of these fissures are  left imprinted on the desk surfaces. When Olivieri reclaims the desk as an art object, he does so by  incorporating this memory of use, which exists in the scribbles and marks that infer names, phrases,  sketches, as well as the reminiscence of those who have thought about, spoken about, or been in  these places. 

Thus, by re-semanticizing the matter, the fissures become grooves, which turn into records, which  play cacophonies. In Cacofonia Disco (2021) [p.xx], the desk moves beyond its original condition  and reappears as a turntable. The vinyl record is replaced by a wooden disc, also manufactured with  micro-grooves that are laser-engraved directly onto the surface, vibrating horizontally and in one  channel, making audible the texts of the cacophonies narrated orally. As in Lousa, the texts do not  present themselves easily for understanding due to the overlap of speeches and the low volume of  the sound output. 

Sixth Notation 

The Circle. A Point of Listening. 

And if the exercise of relating to the artwork also calls for the mediation of the body, inviting it to  resonate or transform into a percussive body? In the art gallery, a kind of “living room” is created,  named Ponto de Escuta (2022) [p.xx], which consists, in its format, of a gathering of chairs from  

public school classrooms in the Federal District, arranged in a circle. The work was conceived with  two axes: the desire to activate listening in the exhibition context, outside the school environment  (cultural space), and the interest in exercising issues related to the idea of the "circle of culture,"  which is part of Paulo Freire’s literacy method.[10] 

Ponto de Escuta becomes a place through its sonic occupation, through actions that provoke  plurivocalities and plural ways of thinking. As French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy well stated, the  sonic “carries with it a form”[11], a form that sound broadens, expands, and thickens. Ponto de  Escuta is a “work in progress,” and its design is forever under construction. Being in listening in  this ‘place-work’ established in the heart of the gallery marks a kind of counterpoint to the state of  the “spy teacher,” the one who listens in secret, one of the roles Olivieri embodied while at the  schools.

As a place for open communication, Ponto de Escuta aims to be a “reflective structure”[12] or a  “resonance box”[13] for diverse speeches, reverberating in the listening of those who choose to sit  there. Unlike the concept of Freire’s "circle of culture," there is no one generative word to activate  the point of listening, but rather generative situations that are provoked by what is on display. Since  the works are poetic translations of experiences from everyday school life, whose circumstances are  shared by many visitors, proximity to Freire’s proposition is achieved as learning takes place,  detached from the school environment and without the presence of a teacher, but rather a  coordinator – who can be either the artist or someone else taking on that role, in a dynamic of  learning facilitated through the "reciprocity of consciousnesses" [14]. 

Of course, what is proposed with Ponto de Escuta is not teaching and learning with the same  purpose presented by Freire in his Círculo de Cultura, because after all, we are dealing with  ‘occupying’ a work of art, in a context aimed at the exhibition and reception of art, the gallery and  cultural center. The work is not “A” classroom but rather an experience with the work, a  construction that refers to the thing but is not the thing itself: it is something that can come to be,  depending on the types of bonds created through the proposals that Olivieri, as an artist-teacher,  introduces during the exhibition, and which are shared there, making the relationship with the object  meaningful, as Freire claims, because to be cognizable, the object needs more than a "simple  relationship of the knowing subject with the cognizable object" [15]. 

There are, therefore, perceptual shifts provoked by Olivieri’s works: sound bodies in art, invented  through the process of “transposing listens,” as the artist declares. The works are enhanced by  speeches, listens, and writings that each, in its own way, expand previously existing notions of  sound. After all, we are dealing with an exhibition of objects that configure an experimental field,  motivated by probing exercises, practices that aspire to freedom and the overcoming of many "sonic  barriers" that form within the school and which, over time and depending on the levels of noise and  cacophonies present, form bubbles that prevent “plurisonorous” listens and the transformation of  the school into a "space-flow" – a notion the artist opposes to the current idea of school as an  immutable space. These “plurisonorous” objects – reinventions of the material and immaterial of  everyday school life – presented and activated in encounters with subjects in a non-school space,  resonate, pointing to other types of learning landscapes, tuned to the path Olivieri has traced as a  teacher-artist, in which, for him, "the school is worlds" and the extra- curricular experience is a way  to eclipse the deaf moments.

[1] The “tempo surdo” (deaf moments) according to the artist, occurs when voices that stand out are  suppressed in situations where there is an attempt to impose control over the narrative. 

[2] OLIVIERI, Luiz. Extraclasse: sondiagem (sounding) and listening as methods of invention.  Supervision by Prof. Dr. Christus Nóbrega. Brasília: UnB, 2021. https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/ 10482/41907 

[3] We will treat this field as Sound Art for the purposes of this text. However, sound, having  become the object of study in different areas of knowledge in recent decades, has received various  denominations depending on its use. According to Araújo, these variations may take the terms  “auditory culture" and "sound studies." ARAÚJO, David D.A. de. Limits of listening:  epistemologies of the sonic in concrete music, acoustic ecology, and sound studies. São Paulo:  ECA/USP, 2019. Advisor: Fernando Henrique de Oliveira Iazzeta. https://teses.usp.br/teses/ disponiveis/27/27158/tde-26072019-092642/pt-br.php 

[4] This is one of the points raised by Raoul Vaneigem in 1966, one of the founders of the  Situationist International movement, as one of the topics gathered in informal debates that  frequently took place among groups of young intellectuals, artists, and students in the late 1960s.  P.18. P.18. Situacionista: teoria e prática de revolução. SP: Conrad Editora do Brasil, 2002. Coleção  Baderna). 

[5] Judith Butler uses this term when writing about postmodernism, politics, gender, and society.  BUTLER, Judith. "Contingent foundations: feminism and the question of 'postmodernism'." From  modernism to postmodernism: an anthology. 2nd ed. NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. P. 390-401. 

[6] The two global references are the works of the French Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995), to whom  the term "concrete music" is attributed, and Pierre Henry (1927-2017). 

[7] For the purposes of this text, "concrete music" is addressed only superficially, to situate the  reader within a set of sound research practices that are part of a broader context, within which  contemporary Sound Art experiences are also located. Although it is an expression dating back to  the 1940s, it still generates debates regarding its meaning and definitions when treated from the  perspective of music. 

[8] OLIVIERI, op.cit., p. 85. 

[9] This object was made in collaboration with the collector Walter Arensberg. The original is in the  Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA). 

[10] The Circle of Culture, conceived in the 1960s, is part of the dynamic methodologies that make  up Paulo Freire's educational approach, which aims, in general terms, to teach through horizontal  dialogue between the educator and the learner, focusing on themes related to the participants'  cultural universe. 

[11] NANCY, Jean-Luc. “To listen.” In: Rev. Outra Travessia. UFSC, p. 160, 1st sem. 2013. [12] Ibid., 164. 

[13] Ibid. 

[14] FIORI, Ernani Maria. Aprender a dizer sua palavra. In: FREIRE, P. Pedagogy of the  Oppressed. 17th ed. RJ: Paz e Terra, 1987. p. 12. 

[15] FREIRE, P. Extension or communication. RJ: Paz e Terra, 2013. p. 73