Alfredo Costa Monteiro (Porto, 1964)

Alfredo Costa Monteiro is a sound artist, improviser, composer and sound poet. He has lived and worked in Barcelona since 1992, the year in which he graduated in sculpture/multimedia with Christian Boltanski at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. His work is situated halfway between sound art, visual arts and sound poetry.

His sound installations and sound pieces are based on unstable processes, conceptual restrictions and forms of an often disconcerting simplicity, where the manipulation of objects as instruments or of instruments as objects has a strong phenomenological aspect. He has been used to working at the extremes of sound, from acoustic solos for almost inaudible paper to performances where the volume acquires a literal physical presence, and has been creating different projects since 2001. Each time, using a different instrumentation, such as the ready-made chord, the ready-made guitar, the tocadiscs, various electro-acoustic devices, synthesizers or resonant objects, to give each of these projects a particular identity.

His work in sound poetry focuses on the musicality of language and its phonetic content, always maintaining a balance with semantics. His poems are generally multilingual and polyglot (mainly in Spanish, Portuguese and French, but also in Catalan and English) and he uses combinatorial systems based on phonemes common to these languages to create multiple meanings, which often lead to confusion and defy comprehension. Some of his works can be found in archives such as Arquivo Digital de Po. Ex, Portugal, and Tapin2, France. In 2022, he created an ephemeral monument, a self-publishing label for his poetic work. From 2019 to 2023, he was a member of crater-Lab, a collective of experimental analogue cinema. In 2017, he won the Palma Ars Acústica international award for his radio play Fragments d'un conte inacabat.

He has performed graphic scores by John Cage, Robert Ashley, Eugènia Balcells, Annea Lockwood, Marina Rosenfeld, Lee Ranaldo, Pauline Oliveros and Walter Marchetti. He has collaborated with many musicians, choreographers, video artists and filmmakers from all over the world, and has presented his work all over Europe, Canada, the United States, Russia and Japan. He has an extensive discography in recordings all over the world, both solo and in different formations.

He has done workshops at Sonoscopia (Porto, Portugal), Hangar (Barcelona), ESDI (Barcelona), Janácek Academy of Music and Performing Arts (Brno, Czech Republic), Arteleku (Sant Sebastià), Facultat de Belles Arts, (Pontevedra), ESAD (Caldas da Rainha, Portugal), ENSEMS (Valencia), TrashVortex (Paris, França), Circuit Torçat (Barcelona), Eufònic (Amposta), Crossroads (Lublin, Poland), Equipo Para (Santa Cruz de Tenerife), Teni Zvuka (Sant Petersburg, Russia), Apiary Studios (London, UK), Larraskito (Bilbao), Sanatorium Dźwięku (Soklowsko, Poland), among others.

Presentation updated in September 2023