VITOR RUAIS NOT A PLACE

Vítor Rua was born in Mesão Frio in 1961 and has lived in Porto since he was five days old.

Composer, improviser, visual artist, writer, filmmaker and researcher: these are not separate careers, but communicating rooms in the same unstable house.

He began making music while still very young and co-founded the Porto rock group GNR at the end of the 1970s, working as guitarist and composer during the group’s formative period. After leaving, he turned decisively towards experimental and contemporary music. In 1982 he created Telectu with musician, musicologist and writer Jorge Lima Barreto.

Over nearly three decades, Telectu became a laboratory for structured improvisation, experimental electronics, prepared instruments, multimedia and encounters with musicians from several generations and geographies. The duo performed hundreds of concerts across Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, Macau, Hong Kong and Cuba, while developing one of the most singular bodies of work in Portuguese experimental music.

Rua’s work crosses written and improvised music, opera, rock, electroacoustic composition, granular guitar, sound for theatre and cinema, video, drawing, painting, sculpture, illustration and literature. These practices do not form a catalogue of parallel occupations: each one contaminates the others.

His research into sound, music and listening gave rise to the field he calls Acusticologia, developed through academic work, essays, books and lectures. Questions of sonic identity, reproduction, error, improvisation, technology and the ontology of sound repeatedly pass through both his theoretical and artistic work.

As a visual artist, he has produced painting, drawing, collage, objects, sculpture and artist’s editions. His anthological exhibition and its book — I Hate Music, born from the proposition I Hate Music But I Love Art — brought several of these bodies of work together. As a writer, he moves between theory, interview, fiction, cosmic manuals, prose poetry and books in which science occasionally trips over a cat.

The death of Jorge Lima Barreto in 2011 did not seal Telectu inside the past. The name and its experimental impulse have continued through new performances, editions and collaborations, including work with Ilda Teresa Castro. The archive remains alive because it refuses to behave like a museum.