C4 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 2020
A man comes to São Paulo to find
his brother. What he discovers,
however, is a city more alluring
than he could have imagined.
“Shine Your Eyes,” from the Bra-
zilian filmmaker Matias Mariani,
finds a distinctive way to tell a fa-
miliar narrative — of immigrants
in megacities, of how dreams can
pummel you and of the complexity
of fraternal bonds.
Streaming on Netflix, the film
follows Amadi (OC Ukeje), a
Lagosian musician, as he trav-
erses through Brazil’s most popu-
lous city looking for his missing
brother, Ikenna (Chukwudi
Iwuji). Amadi’s journey, which is
fueled by familial duty, quickly
morphs into a propulsive detec-
tive story. Amadi soon realizes
that the life his brother purported
to live — from his position as a uni-
versity professor to his purchas-
ing of a house — is a lie. Before dis-
appearing, Ikenna became ob-
sessed with cracking the secret
code to the universe, which he
thinks is a hologram. The search
for Ikenna brings Amadi to differ-
ent parts of São Paulo and he
quickly becomes enamored with
the sounds and sights of the city
(which Mariani, and the cinemat-
ographer Leonardo Bittencourt,
masterfully capture).
With a compelling visual lan-
guage, “Shine Your Eyes” sees
São Paulo through Amadi’s gaze
— meditating on the city’s archi-
tectural feats and intimate com-
munity moments — and takes
care in examining the relationship
between the two brothers and
their Igbo culture. But at times,
the script travels well-worn ter-
rain and leaves too many ques-
tions unanswered, which for a film
with such considered visuals can
feel more imprecise than deliber-
ate.Ike Barry and OC Ukeje in Matias Mariani’s “Shine Your Eyes.”
NETFLIXOld Tale, New Tricks
A familiar immigrant
narrative is filmed in a
distinctive manner.
Shine Your Eyes
Not rated. In English, Portuguese,
Igbo, Hungarian and Chinese, with
subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42
minutes. On Netflix.
LOVIA GYARKYE FILM REVIEWThe series of bronze statues by Wangechi
Mutu that adorns the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art’s facade is scheduled to be on
public display until early November. But
two of the four pieces, “The Seated I” and
“The Seated III,” will remain at the museum
long after the exhibition closes as a part of
its collections, the Met announced this
week.
“Sometimes when you do a site-specific
commission it only works for the specific
site or in that particular context,” Max
Hollein, the museum’s director, said in an in-
terview. “In regard to Wangechi’s works,
it’s clear that on the facade they work as
these four sculptures framing the facade,
transforming the facade, but they also work
as singular objects.”
When they were unveiled last September,
Ms. Mutu’s caryatid sculptures — tradition-
ally female figures carved into architectural
support structures like columns — were the
first artworks to be presented from the face
of the Met’s building on Fifth Avenue. In Ms.
Mutu’s renderings, the figures are released
from their supporting role. Instead of help-
ing to hold up roofs or balconies, they sit
freely on pedestals.
Their style also separates them from the
typical caryatids that visitors might see
elsewhere. “With sloping eyes and long fin-
gers expressive of exceptional reach, they
speak as messengers from an Afrofuturist-
inflected otherworld,” Nancy Princenthal
wrote in The New York Times.
The series, collectively titled “The
NewOnes, will free Us,” was commissioned
by the Met, along with paintings by Kent
Monkman. These efforts, and the acquisi-
tion of Ms. Mutu’s sculptures, are part of a
larger push by the museum to increase its
engagement with contemporary art.
Last November, the acclaimed exhibition
of Ms. Mutu’s sculptures was extended
from January 2020 to June. It was extended
again when the museum was forced to shut
down because of the coronavirus pandemic.(In June, the Met announced plans to re-
open to the public on Aug. 29 pending state
and city approval.)
Plans for how Ms. Mutu’s sculptures will
be shown when they move indoors are still
being formulated, Mr. Hollein said: “They
will be displayed, certainly, as part of our
contemporary collection, but obviously we
have a strong context with our collection ofAfrican art as well as our collection of Euro-
pean, classical sculpture.”
Carol Bove, a sculptor known for large-
scale works that combine modernist and
minimalist elements, will be the next artist
to tackle the Met’s frontispiece. Mr. Hollein
anticipates that her installation, originally
scheduled to debut in September, will be ex-
hibited in 2021.Met Acquires Two Mutu Sculptures
The additions are from the
series on the museum’s
Fifth Avenue facade.By PETER LIBBEYBRUCE SCHWARZ, VIA THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Wangechi Mutu’s “The Seated I” (2019) is one of the sculptures that the Metropolitan acquired.archaeology, has spent the past decade
studying the building’s extravagantly re-
verberant acoustics to reconstruct the sonic
world of Byzantine cathedral music. Ms.
Pentcheva argues that Hagia Sophia’s mys-
tical brilliance reveals itself fully only if it is
viewed as a vessel for animated light — and
sound.
“The void is a stage,” she said in a recent
interview over Zoom.
Conducting research inside this con-
tested monument has required a mixture of
diplomacy, ingenuity and technology. Turk-
ish authorities forbade singing inside Hagia
Sophia, even when it was operated as a mu-
seum. Now that the building falls under the
jurisdiction of religious authorities, that ban
will harden and further research may be
even more difficult.
But Ms. Pentcheva’s existing work culmi-
nated last fall in the release of “The Lost
Voices of Hagia Sophia,” an album that
brings to life the stately mystery of Byzan-
tine cathedral liturgy, bathed in the glitter-
ing acoustics of the space for which it was
written — even though it was recorded in a
studio in California.
For about 20 years, it has been possible to
superimpose the acoustics of a particular
space onto recorded music during postpro-
duction. A pioneer was Altiverb, a plug-in
software that draws on a large library of vir-
tual spaces so that a recorded track can be
retrofitted to seem like it was done in, for
example, the Berlin Philharmonie or the
King’s Chamber inside the Great Pyramid
of Giza.
But in what has become known as live vir-
tual acoustics, processors and speakers
provide the acoustic feedback of a particu-
lar space in real time, so that musicians can
adjust their performance as if they were re-
ally in another building.
Jonathan Abel, a consulting professor at
the Center for Computer Research in Music
and Acoustics at Stanford, devised a plan
with Ms. Pentcheva that allowed her to cap-
ture vital information about the acoustic
properties of Hagia Sophia with the help of a
balloon, discreet recording equipment and
a cooperative security guard.
In the winter of 2010, Ms. Pentcheva ob-
tained permission to enter what was then a
museum at dawn, when Istanbul was quiet.
She persuaded a guard to stand in a spot
that would have been occupied by singers
during the Byzantine era and to pop a bal-
loon. In the meantime, she stationed herself
where a privileged member of the public
might have experienced mass. Micro-
phones captured the explosion of sound and
the ensuing wash of reverberations.
Ms. Pentcheva was allowed to capture
only four such pops over two visits. But
those bursts of sound yielded a wealth of
data.
“That little balloon pop brings back all the
information about the material and the size
of the space,” Mr. Abel said. “You can think
of a human voice as being made up of a
whole bunch of balloon pops. Each voice
drags behind it a bunch of impulse respons-
es, like streamers behind a wedding car.”
The balloon noises, along with maps of
the interior, allowed Mr. Abel to identify
what he called the acoustic fingerprint of
the building, including the multidirectional
refraction of sound as it bounces off the
dome and marble colonnades. His comput-
er simulation was then integrated into a setof microphones and speakers.
Thus the members of Cappella Romana, a
vocal ensemble based in Portland, Ore.,
specializing in Byzantine chant, recorded
“The Lost Voices” in a space that persua-
sively mimicked the acoustics of Hagia So-
phia — with its luscious reverberation,
cross echoes and amplification of particular
frequencies.
Alexander Lingas, a musicologist and the
music director of Cappella Romana, said
that the live virtual acoustics were transfor-
mative to his understanding of the group’s
repertory. The long reverberation time dic-
tated slower tempos. Basses singing drones
made subtle pitch adjustments to match
frequencies of maximum resonance.
Mr. Lingas said that some pieces only
“made sense” inside the simulated acous-
tics. One example featured on the album is a
cherubic hymn that likens the singers to an-
gels.
“The music is designed to convey that,”
Mr. Lingas said. “But I remember editing
this piece and thinking, ‘My, this is really
strange.’ ” Yet, he added, as the group re-
hearsed it with the virtual acoustics, a pat-
tern of repeated undulating motifs built up
rippling momentum until, as he described
it, “the sound essentially achieved liftoff.”
Ms. Pentcheva believed that in Byzantine
cathedral chant, reverberation was key to
invoking the divine presence. She pointed
to the exuberant amount of melisma in the
repertory, where a single syllable isstretched over multiple notes. In the liquid
acoustics of Hagia Sophia, words sung in
this way blur, the way a line drawn in ink
bleeds on wet paper.
“Rather than containing this smearing of
semantics, the music itself actually intensi-
fies it,” Ms. Pentcheva said. “So there is this
process of alienation and estrangement
from the register of human language that
happens in Hagia Sophia, and is a desired
goal.”
In Greek Orthodox rites, Ms. Pentcheva
argued, acoustics and chant interact in a
way that “is not about sound carrying infor-
mation, but sound precipitating experience.
It is a fully corporeal investment.”
The recording provides a glimpse of that
experience. Phrases chanted in unison
leave a ghostly imprint. Rhythmic shudders
and grace notes set off blurry squiggles of
overlapping echoes. Chords unfurl in rever-
berant bloom.
The acoustic drama of Hagia Sophia
would have unfolded alongside the chang-
ing light and curling smoke of burning in-
cense, enveloping the senses. The effect is
described in a 6th-century description of
the building by Paul the Silentiary, an aris-
tocrat and poet at the court of Justinian.
“He speaks about a human action that
brings into presence the divine reaction, the
divine voice,” Ms. Pentcheva said. “In a
sense that is the reverberation of the space:
After the human voice stops singing, the
building continues.”A Studio Produces Hagia Sophia’s Sound
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Top, Hagia Sophia’s
rededication as a Muslim place
of worship threatens to cloak its
acoustics. Above, a balloon pop
that helped Bissera Pentcheva
capture the acoustics.Bissera Pentcheva was
allowed to capture only
four pops of sound over
two visits. But they
yielded a wealth of data.
PIOTR REDLINSKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESBISSERA V. PENTCHEVA