Artist statement

I would like to question our approach to artistic expression in the mass-market era, our capacity to perceive and interpret the world and the self, and our subsequent consciousness and freedom. I dream about and work for a way of creation, interpretation, and reception of art within an environment free of market domination, academic technocracy, and administrative deception.

As an artist, I am interested in the perceptive approach to creating situations and in the literalness of perception while inhabiting them, their here and now. I feel that today's reality is a place where productivity and efficiency have been absolutized (do more, do faster, do better). In such a reality, the simple fact of sitting in there and contemplating is so powerful, revolutionary even.

In my pieces, I aim to question the normalization of that productive approach to everyday life, which causes us fatigue and distances us from the capacity to construct ourselves as reflexive subjects. I create spaces to practice rest as an end in itself.

...If anybody is sleepy, let them go to sleep... (John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, 1949)

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre for La Nausée, John Kennedy Toole for A Confederacy of Dunces, John Steinbeck for The Grapes of Wrath, and José Luis Sampedro for El río que nos lleva.

Thanks to Galina Ustvolskaya, the truest composer, and to Éliane Radigue, Eva-Maria Houben, and Jakob Ullmann for defying the immediacy era. Thanks to William Basinski for being nothing enough.

Thanks to Dada (dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza). Thanks to Fluxus. Thanks to what is meaningless, useless, and empty according to the mass-market society.

And thanks to all artists yet to be discovered, lost in the ocean of information, that will guide and inspire my work at some point. I am constantly searching for you.

This open-source website has been kindly designed and developed by Giang Tran 😎. Still a work in progress!

Hi!

My name is Pilar Miralles and I was born in Almería (Spain) in 1997. I am a composer and researcher currently based in Helsinki (Finland). I completed my Master's Degrees in Electroacoustic Composition and in Composition in Madrid and Helsinki, respectively, and now I am a doctoral candidate in the Arts Study Programme of DocMus Doctoral School at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. My artistic research project and overall practice as a composer aim at questioning the value of action and rethinking the meaning of rest in a social context of productive overload and permanent availability.

My work as a composer has been supported by Teosto, MES, and Pro Musica Säätiö.

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