Cuchicheos

[2022]

A long flag made of square membranes that are connected together and fall to the floor to soften and cuddle the ground like a long rubbery oscillatory blanket sound system that softly whispers a distributed multi-channel sound piece in the room. Each membrane is a speaker that softly diffuses sound. This installation contains a series of “membranal operations” of translations and transductions that are meant to be polyphonic mechanisms for fuzzing borders, meaning, logics, categories, and rigid lines so we can explore ways of (re)arranging our realities otherwise: through intimate, poetic and vibratory states.

The audio piece that activates this work is based on the poem La Contadora (The Teller of Tales) by Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, a poem that was translated into English by Ursula Le Guin. This is the first membranal operation, South-North dialogue, and link between sci-fi and poetry within this piece. Mistral’s poem signals ideas of attuning to otherness, listening, and paying attention to the many stories that build our realities, most importantly to the ones that are whispered around us in unknown languages. I understand this poem as a door to other subjectivities and languages that have been long forgotten but still create the worlds we live in. I propose new translations in order to explore what else can be unveiled when language stops being semantic and bound to linear logic.

The “membranal operations” implemented question the very meaning of language and reason through: custom-made techno-illogical recording apparatuses that imprint specific sonic (noisy) qualities into the recordings; as well as through poetry readings to machine learning algorithms that respond with dynamic alien sounds; and through subjective takes of the rhythms and patterns within the poem. These experimental translations open up new languages and possible meanings within sounds, screams, instruments, whispers, interferences, and noise.