• The director of El Born CCM, Marta Marín-Dòmine, and sound artist Josep Manuel Berenguer will open the performance with a talk in the hall at 6.30 p.m. on Wednesday 20 September.
• The multifocal acousmatic performance The traces are not the facts, which can be watched from the viewing gallery, will take place from 7.00 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. at the archaeological site.

Sixteen loudspeakers installed in the archaeological site for the installation To dwell means to leave traces resonate in the acoustic space of the Rec Comtal sector with a sonorous meditation on the impossibility of reconstructing the past.

As soon as the sound deserts us, its influence and all that is symptomatic also seems to be wiped out for us. This is a good allegory concerning the inescapable transformation of perceiving the facts to which history alludes, the deformations of the historical perception of the past and the transience of its imagery. This was so important for Walter Benjamin, who wrote the texts that both the installation and this multifocal acousmatic performance are taken from.

We are unable to reconstruct the precise details of a rich daily life full of sound track generators erased with a pick and shovel by those evicted in 1716, by order of the Bourbon monarchy. The sounds of gambling games, which were not always legal, at times conflictive (ball, dice, chess, cards, cards, jacks, …), will never return. Nor will those noises of butchery, carpentry, blacksmiths’ and boilermakers’ activities, or of the Rec water that entered and left the houses through the aqueducts, the sewers and that people drew from the wells, or of birds and people’s footsteps on the stone pavement be heard again. However, we can remember them with present-day sounds, which build evocative landscapes capable of making us think about how important and meaningful their disappearance would be for us.

The traces are not the facts, in the same way that “the map is not the territory”, as Alfred Korzybski coined, does not mean to articulate the past historically, nor does it mean to know it “as it really was”, but it means “to get hold of a memory as it glitters in an instant of danger”, because, as Walter Benjamin also shows us, “the past is only graspable as the image that glitters never to return in the instant in which it becomes recognisable”.