ANDREA POLLI | Promessassom 2024

Polli’s work for Cultivamos Cultura and in residence at Buinho explored sculpture in relation to the definition of data. While she had been defining data as computational numbers derived from digital soundscape recordings, some of her research has been related to the handmade process of creating pottery using traditional techniques. Reflecting on this process made her consider all the ‘data’ points within pottery: the chemical composition of the clay itself, the location where the clay is harvested, the processing and forming of the clay by hand, recording the movements, skill and structure of the hands, and the goals and purpose of the potter, i.e. what the vessel is used for.

For this project, Polli lived in the countryside in southern Portugal and recorded the sound of ubiquitous village bells along with other characteristic parts of the soundscape. She took these very short recordings and created spectrograms of them, two dimensional images that graph the amplitude of sounds at various frequencies. The bells create highly structured spectrograms, with discrete vibrations and specific overtones. In contrast, birds and other animal calls create bands of frequencies that seem to travel in smooth arcs. With the help of modeler Nuno Sousa, she mapped the spectrograms as textures onto simple geometric shapes and 3d printed the resulting sculptural forms. The forms are very organic, and appear biological, like ultrasound images of organs or tumors. Polli then created clay bread dishes from the forms using hand harvested local clay that could be used to bake loaves of bread that take on the form of the spectral shapes.