2022: ‘Beware of the Giant’ by Isabella Solar Villaseca at O—Overgaden, Copenhagen (DK)
- sound editing, mixing and mastering
image: Laura Stamer
In Villaseca’s grand new film Beware of the Giant, pixelated and low-fi footage, spanning the 1973 Chilean military coup by General Augusto Pinochet to current civilian protests in Chile, radiates from a large commercial LED screen. It is accompanied by a soundtrack of Chilean folksongs and protest anthems from Violeta Parra and Victor Jara to Cueca-dancing and public chants of “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (The people, united, will never be defeated).
Colorful and seductive, the film and surrounding installations challenge the knife-edge balance between, on the one hand, spellbinding, propaganda-like “tools” rooted in rhythm—think of any advertisement, TikTok-meme, or dance hit—and the search for sincerity and solidarity in the South American musical landscape. Between these poles, Villaseca’s works unveil deep rifts of social conflict and structural, economic violence that have not ceased to exist despite Chile’s dictatorship being long gone. (Overgaden.org)
For this film, we worked with a wide variety of source material, cleaning the audio and editing it to the video cut. We then mixed the sound in the installation space to get the best possible sound.