Photo by Enric Coromina |
Alfredo Costa Monteiro was born in Portugal and has lived and worked in Barcelona since 1992.
He finished his studies in sculpture / multimedia with Christian Boltanski at the School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1992, the year he moved to Barcelona. Since then, he has developed a multi-activity covering visual art (installations), sound/visual poetry and sound. His installations and sound pieces, all of a low-fi character, have in common an interest for unstable processes, raw materials and gestures, where the manipulation of objects as instruments or instruments as objects has a strong phenomenological aspect.
In sound, his most important and stable projects are Cremaster (with Ferran Fages), i treni inerti (with Ruth Barberán), Atolón (with Ruth Barberán and Ferran Fages) and Astero (with Juan-Matos Capote). He has collaborated with many musicians, choreographers and video-artists, and has toured all over Europe, Canada and Japan. He has an extense discography in labels such as antifrost, rossbin, absurd, étude records, monotype records, another timbre, creative sources, potlatch, organized music from thessaloniki, cathnor in solo and with different formations.
In sound poetry, he works on the musicality of language: language pushed to the limit of its phonetic entrenchments, evicting meaning for the benefit of sound, in a combinatory framework that generates its own architecture. He writes in spanish, portuguese and french.
He plays turntable, electric guitar, accordion , electro-acoustic devices and resonant objects.