From painting to movement: the birth of Writing Animations

During my first years in Berlin, I kept developing my painting. However, the growing lack of space stopped me from working in the usual painting formats. Having to adapt my creative process to the size of a simple desk, I found in 2D animation the perfect escape route to keep creating. That is how Writing Animations was born: a project conceived at first as a way of writing animations, a direct way of sketching and recording ideas for the future. This limitation of space became an opportunity that let me dive fully into stop motion and video editing. By deliberately leaving out any storyboard, this amalgam of sequences —which at first might seem meaningless— worked as a purely visceral record. It expressed the emotions of the moment and the spontaneity of a young man who found in Berlin a new world to experiment in.

The city itself acted as a great visual and creative catalyst. Although I never met him in person, the work of the renowned Italian artist Blu left a strong mark and largely shaped the idea behind my 2D animation. Likewise, the Berlin scene opened the door to meeting and collaborating with other resident creators with notable careers, adding to the project, among others, the visual artist Kalma and Paul Schenberg of the Wisp collective, and the sound artists Anna la Marciana and Martí Guillem, the latter being the one who introduced me to the wonderful world of experimental music and noise in the city.

At the same time, this project marked the beginning of my career in experimental music. Interacting with the animated image led me to perform live, bringing in improvisation on the classical piano and establishing an inseparable dialogue between the visual gesture and the sound response.

POESÍA SINTÉTICA is a recital hidden inside a rave, or a rave taking over a recital. Elsa Moreno's texts merge with Sr.Charli's synthesizers in an atmosphere that travels from ambient to techno and noise.

The show, markedly political, is made up of several pieces about poetry, about men, or about punk. Taking advantage of that state of hypnosis, amid loops and synthesizers, the duo throws their respective bombs at the figure of the man, the media and the construction of language. As one of the lines cries out: “What is there to say, if saying is creating the world and the only answer is to watch it burn”

Collective for digital art & culture.
Leipzig, DE

Since 2016 we have been working together on cultural projects focused on new technologies, philosophy and visual and sound experimentation: laboratories, art festivals and stage productions. We are currently working on an artistic video game about the use of hydrogen, in collaboration with the University of Leipzig, Germany.

This has been one of the greatest sound challenges I have had the pleasure of taking part in, not only because of the wonderful team around us but also because of the fantastic direction of an artist with such a career ahead of her and with the energy to tell stories in such an intense and overwhelming way. I have always felt free to try to interpret her words and gestures through sound.

La Hora Blanca is a recital, a concert, a play, a book without pages, a dance piece with too much text, a forest, a lake, a deer. The poems of the book En un lugar limítrofe (“In a Liminal Place”) leave the page to become a stage event. From the golden hour of dusk to the first rays of dawn, the poetic voice crosses a forest full of shadows. She is pulled, on one side, by the desire for a revolution of the affections, and on the other, by the weight of the romantic tradition.

Credits

Direction, texts and performance: Elsa Moreno
Sound production and live music: Carles Pedrón
Directing support: Ana Sanahuja
Choreographic support: Juana Varela
Set design: Carla Cea
Lighting: Carles Sanchís

A compilation of tracks and sound projects by different artists, made from sounds recovered from the Paiporta piano of the musician Néstor Calderer. The piano was wrecked in the DANA floods that hit Valencia in 2024.

info and listening:
https://audiotalaia.bandcamp.com/album/corda-fang-samplers

Synopsis

Esparto-grass voices that keep memory alive. The story of a village runs through the inheritance of nicknames. How much room is left to build an identity of one's own?

Credits

Created by: Sara Espinar, Elsa Moreno and Mariana Sofía Valero
Performance: Sara Espinar
Choreographic support: Mariana Sofía Valero
Dramaturgy: Elsa Moreno
Production management: Carlota Llorens
Production and music composition: Sr.Charli
Lighting: Clara Castellano
Set design and construction: Carla Cea
Costumes: Feli Pérez
Lyric voice: Iris Almenara
Voice and English texts: Elia Cervera
Recorded voices: Vicenta López, Gabriel Asensi, María Marco, Milagros Sanchís
Sound post-production: Martín Aguirre and Pablo Ojeda
With the support of: IVC and Circuito Bucles
Collaborators: Espai La Granja, Ajuntament d'Alzira, A Contar Mentiras, Espai Inestable

DA-NA is an experiment, a sound installation that uses organic and electronic elements to explore the relationship between sound, the body and the environment. DA-NA is a political critique that reflects on the responsibility of political leaders, DA-NA questions the justice system, DA-NA is a cry of protest and above all a tribute to the victims and to all of us who managed to see humanity amid the tragedy and the mud. DA-NA invites us to reflect on our social and political conduct, on the importance of empathy and collective action in building a fairer and more sustainable future.

The installation is made up of several elements that interact with each other: the mud-filled shovel used by the artist during the weeks of cleaning up in Zone 0; a timed dripper system holding between 36 and 40 litres of water, representing the liquid contained in a human body; and a blank wooden canvas under the shovel, fitted with an amplifier and exciter speakers to amplify the sound of the mud dripping onto it. Over roughly twelve days, the dripping water cleans the mud off the shovel while at the same time growing mould and rot on it, transforming the object and letting the mud fall onto the amplified canvas, creating a new work from the stain left on the white canvas. DA-NA is a work about my personal experience and how it has completely changed our lives.

This project is the direct result of the experience accumulated throughout my career, both as a musician and composer and as a visual artist. This double side has given me a more dynamic technical and sound perception, necessary to tackle more complex subjects. The production has not followed a strict schedule; it has advanced in different stages, the fruit of chance and intuition, giving it a more emotional character, although always sustained by an indispensable scientific process. The starting point was to internalise psychological and sociological concepts through conversations with professionals in these fields. This foundation connects directly with the painting and documentary project I carried out at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon in 2007, where I researched technical aspects of colour and interviewed people in contexts far from their everyday lives. All of this underpins the main aim of the work: raising awareness of our current sociopolitical context. Visually, the viewer enters the work through 2D animations, drawings and hand-made paintings that portray my experience but are coded so that each person can interpret them and make them their own. On a musical and conceptual level, profound works such as those of Max Richter have shaped the social and emotional sense of the project. The composition investigates sound frequencies capable of altering our emotions, experimenting with analogue instruments such as the piano, synthesizers and sound objects created to generate the descriptive strategies of this audiovisual installation-performance. To structure this work, different processes of code and creative programming have been analysed. Delving into the depth and technicality of conceptual artists such as Alva Noto has set a more scientific line, and through creators such as John Cage I have gone deeper into decontextualisation, not only of sound but also of the visual. This has laid the basis for defining the reactive part of the project, making it possible to unify the analogue and the digital, the visual and the sound. In short, the project presents itself as a crossroads between art, sociology, technology and science. Although it deals with complex technical and scientific subjects, it makes a strong point of the emotional awareness of the individual from an anarcho-emotional and critical point of view.

NEGRA

NEGRA is an artistic research project developed over two years around the colour black, understood not only as a chromatic value or an absence of light, but as a plastic language, an active material and a device of meaning. Originally conceived during my final project at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, the project takes the form of an introspective reflection on the human condition, taking as its starting point personal experiences linked to childhood bullying. However, the trauma is not approached literally but sublimated poetically: identity is understood as a dynamic, unstable and relational process.

Far from being conceived as a uniform colour, black is revealed here as a sensitive and variable territory. Through a rigorous experimental process, the colour is obtained by two paths that dialogue with each other: the complex saturation and mixing of the three primary colours, and the making of my own pigments by carbonising woods from different species of trees.

Formally, the practice is articulated through a transversal methodology that brings together painting, illustration, artist's book and video documentation. The pictorial work is built by superimposing thin layers of colour, with a technical logic close to watercolour but using oil and mixed media. This progressive accumulation of matter creates a fascinating perceptual game: at a certain distance, light and shadow suggest recognisable or almost figurative appearances; but on close observation, the image fractures to reveal abstract structures that recall maps, reliefs or topographic formations.

The works thus operate as anonymous portraits that avoid direct figurative representation in order to focus on inner states, tensions and manifestations of the subconscious. NEGRA stops functioning as a descriptive element and becomes an open space of encounter. A tension between image and matter where illusory darkness invites the viewer to uncover, layer by layer, their own memory and perception.

Carles Pedrón, known artistically as Sr. Charli (Valencia, 1982), is a composer, visual artist and cultural manager. In 2007 he presented his first conceptual project at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon (France), with an honourable mention. In 2010 he moved to Germany, where he developed, self-taught, his training in 2D animation, piano improvisation and electroacoustic composition, shaping a practice that integrates sound and visual creation through analogue and digital media.

He has taken part in social and collective projects linked to artistic creation in Germany. He is also a co-founder of the cultural space Kontor-80 in Leipzig and a member of the collective Wisp, where he has collaborated on cultural management projects, sound improvisation applied to performance, experimental 2D animation audiovisual projects, creative programming and sound design.

In 2022 he settled in Alboraia, where he develops projects of sound experimentation and stage composition together with the poet Elsa Moreno and founded the collective Proyecto Nulo, aimed at collaborative cultural creation and management. Its first initiative, Experimental Nulo, focuses on the production and live documentation of experimental audiovisual proposals.

Using hand-drawn 2D animation techniques and programmed systems, he generates visual environments that can be modified in real time from sound frequencies, addressing contemporary issues such as mental health, bullying and self-management processes, from a critical and transformative perspective.

This methodology allows him to build a hybrid language in which the visual and the sonic dialogue to express emotions, inner tensions and processes of resilience, placing fragility not as an endpoint but as a starting point.

He offers the audience an experience that goes beyond the representation of pain, incorporating dynamics of reconstruction, resistance and change, in a space where technology and manual expression coexist between the intimate and the collective.

Write to me for bookings or collaborations: