Mendietan is Basque for ‘in the mountains’. This work begins in the Basque mountains where Mattin and Rosy Parlane rest their computers and microphones on sleeping bags and begin a private process of aural intervention and documentation. The processed sounds on Mendietan are never performed ‘publicly’, confined to headphones and a minidisk recorder. They exist privately within the public space.
What remains outside of the private sphere? The visual cue, ambiguous technical activity at a distance. Without aural clues, a possible audience has no choice but to invent an agenda, actively misinterpret the scene.
The work continues when Mattin presents a set of still images to four writers and asks them to perform the role of an active audience; to create/expose possible narratives in the work independently, without access to the sounds that were produced.
Mendietan is realised in material form as a CD and photo/essay booklet. The link to the performance context has been severed and can only be constantly reinvented, based on the evidence of these multiple impressions. It is possible that Mendietan is characterised by the calmness of the ‘environment’, and the ‘disruption’ of the intervention, but this assumes an original calmness/neutrality that is impossible to verify. Only the physicality of the final product can be verified. The rest is a fiction, a creation out of nothing. Joel Stern

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