Catástrofe y utopía en la ópera experimental: Os Desastres da Guerra de Nuno Ramos

Ruin has long ceased to be part of the past and become the prevailing condition of the present. To ecological disaster are added economic crises and the unravelling of the social fabric. We are apparently living in permanent catastrophe. Is a future possible out of this ruin? Is a world possible out of extinction? A Extinção É Para Sempre is the name of a collective project undertaken by Brazilian artist Nuno Ramos between May 2021 and May 2022. Of its seven episodes, I shall focus on Os Desastres da Guerra, an experimental opera in which the bond between word and sound provides a new portal to escape the media hypervisibility and sensory overload we live in. “Experimental opera” functions as a category that expands the limits of performance or sound installation. It is, in other words, a tool we can use to analyse the different elements that make up Os Desastres da Guerra: living paintings revealing corporeal fossils, musical scores that make social blindness audible, and sonic catastrophes that experience their own reversibility, a possible world of vocal imagination.