Esmeralda Conde Ruiz
Esmeralda Conde Ruiz
Esmeralda Conde Ruiz is a Spanish award-winning interdisciplinary composer and audio visual artist who lives and works in London.
She specialises in creating artworks that focus on human voices and life experiences. Her site specific compositions evolve from a visual starting point and develop into sound landscapes with rhythmic patterns. In her often multilingual compositions she interacts with light and dark, colour, staged elements and moving images.
She has worked with choirs from Ecuador to New York, to Syria and Sydney. Her experience ranges from creating and directing the 500 amateur choir who performed at the 2016 opening of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London to writing a composition for 350 child singers from 7 different countries in multiple languages for Dresdner Philharmonie.
Alongside her own artistic practice Esmeralda also composes for concert halls, theatres, sound installations and film and her music has been broadcast on radio and TV internationally. She has composed award-winning film soundtracks, campaigns for the United Nations and has worked with artists such as Yoko Ono, Olafur Eliasson, Nick Cave, Peter Liversidge and Matthew Herbert.
In 2020 Esmeralda founded the E Ensemble, an online ensemble of singers from all over the world. Together with the ensemble she is exploring ways to compose music specifically for performing online in the digital space and exploring the sonic qualities of technology and voice.
Cabin Fever is a durational audiovisual artwork by Esmeralda Conde Ruiz that explores vulnerability and dreaming. Composed for an ensemble of voices, domestic sounds and Zoom, this iteration of Cabin Fever features singers from ten countries as they document dreams and transform their screens into a mosaic of colour.
We hear new languages as the artwork leads us on a journey across the world visiting dreamers as they sleep. In this work the software itself becomes an active part of the ensemble as Cabin Fever explores the sonic potential of the virtual space, creatively playing with the latency and parameters of the technology. Singers’ voices hover at the edge of distortion, as familiar noises from our homes join in the performance.
As the baton is passed between singers, new colour’s emerge as each person manually covers their home computer cameras with different everyday items to create a mosaic of colour. Each colour spectrum represents a different group of singers as each computer’s camera reacts to lighting states and also the materiality of the objects selected from each of the singers’ homes. Although we hear the singers’ voices, we never see them. Each group of singers share one dream before the next group takes over.
Through a multimedia art practice that spans sound, performance, moving image and technology, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz examines human voices and their sonic environments. She investigates the idea of multiculturalism and how humans connect via memories and voice. Her work questions how we as humans are shaped by the need to connect and communicate and how we express this sonically.
Image: Cabin Fever, duration: 20 minutes. TULCA Gallery, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh