Listenings. A Selection of Current Sound Art

Escuchas, in the plural, is a gathering, a meeting of diverse artists and their respective works. It is a call to be listeners, to be attentive. It is the repeated invitation to enter the gallery in search of sound. It is the plurality of habitable spaces from experience. It is a way of addressing the many forms of assuming the meaning of what we are as resonant bodies. It is also a question: do you listen?

Sound art situates itself in the contemporary context as a space that invites sound and listening, also serving as a critical device against the dominant tendency to see, think, and touch. In this art form, sound is sought as a central element and method of aesthetic, sensory, material, and conceptual reflection. Elusive to closed definitions, sound art seeks its own niche in practice, especially in listening and in fields such as sculpture, installation, performance, and composition.

Sound is a fundamental element of our vital experience, though often ignored in terms of the attention and reflection we give it. As a medium, technique, process, and artistic object, it has been present in part of musical discourse for millennia, but it is only in the contemporary era where, beyond categories and hand in hand with technological exploration, it opens to new directions and asserts itself as a space of creation in its own right. While sound art is realized through non-electronic methods such as sculpture and installation, it is in the processes of sonic landscape recording and digital manipulation of sounds, objects, and spaces where the richness of possibilities for working with it is found, often undertaken as a path that leads from and toward listening.

Listening is situated in this context as silence and stillness, as attention to the manifestations of what sounds, to allow from there an opening to new dimensions. Listening is silent and invisible; it implies not only a method of approaching sound, but an attitude of meditation, imagination, and creation of realities from the experience of sound itself and its relationships, thus exercising a role that transcends the audible to address aspects proper to human activity, such as language, the sensory, space-time, matter, the affective and emotional, heritage, culture, the socio-political dimension, and ecology.

Escuchas is presented as an exhibition that is faithful to this plurality of processes and manifestations of sonic artistic production. It is a selection of sound art compositions that brings together a total of twelve works reproduced continuously and created as pieces for multichannel sound, specially adapted by each artist for display in LAB3. These pieces reflect directly on the impact of sound within aesthetic values proper to the visual arts: space, form, surface, texture, body, matter, and concept — in the case of sound, reconsidered from values proper to it such as transience, ubiquity, invisibility, vibration, and listening.

The selection of pieces is aimed at reflecting on sound as its own independent artistic dimension, seeking to assume its presence as a space of immersion in listening that invites stillness, silence, and reflection. Thus, LAB3 is proposed not as a place that is exhausted in a mere visit, but above all as an intimate space of recurring dialogue, where multiple listenings expand consciousness through sound, inside and outside the gallery, to which one is encouraged to return again and again.

The following activities were carried out within the framework of this exhibition:

A selection of current sound art

Design and installation of a sound installation under the curatorship of Miguel Isaza. A project that brought together the work of 12 sound artists from an equal number of countries. A selection of sound compositions in which the sonic landscape occupied a prominent place. Participants: Alejandro Cornejo (Peru), Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (India), David Velez (Colombia), Edu Comelles (Spain), Fabio Perletta (Italy), France Jobin (Canada), John Grzinich (United States), Manrico Montero (Mexico), Robert Curgenven (Australia), Simon Whetham (United Kingdom), Yann Novak (United States), Yannick Dauby (France).

Lecture and listening session: Women who sound and resound in Latin America.

Guest: Ana Maria Romano.

Composer and researcher Ana Maria Romano shared with the Medellin public excerpts from her research on the participation of women in the panorama of sound art and electronic arts in Latin America, followed by a small-format concert in Lab3, the Sound Experimentation Room.

Talk and sound performance: There is something recorded inside the rocks

Guest: Alfredo Gallardo (Mexico City)

A conversation about the artist’s creative process around his sound art and new media projects, and a small-format concert in which different possibilities of the sonic landscape were explored using electromagnetic waves and electroacoustic objects.

Talk and sound performance: Chaos in Versailles

Fernando Sierra – Don Elvis (Bogota)

Musician and sound artist Fernando Sierra spoke with the public about his creative process in experimental music, followed by a sound performance in which he combined the reading of texts and voice improvisation with different self-built instruments.

Laboratory: Capturing sounds to produce artistic installations

Guest: David Velez (Bogota)

In this laboratory, we captured and processed sounds using different methods such as field recordings, studio recordings, and the use of special microphones and transducers for capturing sounds that propagate through air, water, and solids. At the end of the laboratory, a collective composition exercise was held in Lab 3. Seventeen people participated in this laboratory, including artists.

Talk and listening session: Blind cinema

Guest: David Velez (Bogota)

One of the participating artists in the exhibition Escuchas, David Velez, presented an eight-channel sound performance in which he explored the idea of a short film without images, where the narrative was built from dissections of different sonic landscapes manipulated in real time. That same evening, the results of the laboratory Capturing sounds, taught by the same artist during the week, were presented.