These Three Songs are part of a project that includes twelve of them, hence the numbering, which at first glance may seem arbitrary. I have included in number V a non-exhaustive list of concentration camps, transit camps, illegal detention places, gulags…

This terrible litany, broadcast by loudspeakers hidden in the mezzo’s dress, can, if necessary, be said live. In this case, the reciter or the recording must be perceived off-camera, as an intrusion, a pollution of the artistic space.

I have chosen to set these texts to music while keeping the annotations of Abel Robino’s work, who is at the origin of the six “boxes” notebooks that are at the origin of the whole project. For the second of these three songs, I preferred to work on the text in German.

Luis Naón

Texts

III
Pandora’s Box is the glass costume that covers us, like a rain that has been traveling since the beginning of time, taking us in the air, in tiny particles, traveling through snowy mountains and cordilleras, rivers, forests, deltas overturned over populated cities, up and down, outside and inside, like a tiny region or a space that has forgotten its name.

Note: coffin shape, closed shape

V
Pandora’s Box is a hermetically sealed and dark house that keeps all the pain of the world, its injustices. Here everything remains condensed, alive, recovered, always in the present. Here are the conversations of relatives and friends who say goodbye before their city is razed and conquered by the exterminating horde of the new conquistador. Here are the sleeping children who do not know what awaits them. Here are all the victims of History with a capital letter, in its unstoppable advance: the tortured, deported, persecuted, condemned, shot, burned, buried, incinerated and forgotten. Now we are in February 1944, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in the old land of the kings and dukes of Piast, founders of Poland. Here are two boys, naked and sweaty, hugging each other in terror as the gas asphyxiates their lungs and they think of the taste of that dry, dirty sweat they share, which was also the taste of summer. Thanks to Pandora’s box, we reach out to them, to touch them and pull them to us, to here, in this moment, thanks to a fold of time and space that our art inaugurates and allows.

Note: concentrated form, to underline it with obscure tasks

IX
The box of Pandora does not have forms and has them all. It is a cloud. It moves.
The cloud is a mirror in the air. The mirror cracks and it is a river. It moves too, to the Sea of Tranquility. The Sea of Tranquility is on the moon. “In the sky goes the moon / with a child in his hand,” wrote Federico García Lorca in his Romancero.