Cuchicheos [Fragmento]

[2022]

Silicone + latex membranes/speakers, three-channel audio piece. Thanks to Manaswi Mishra for Machine Learning Experiments. 

In Cuchicheos, a flag of three mebrane-like suspended rubbery sound systems, each fitted with a small buzzer speaker, diffuses a nearly inaudible score of poetry readings, AI algorithms, and alien sounds. The piece, a sculptural sound work whose title means “whispers,” contains a series of “membranal operations,” translations and transductions that are meant to be polyphonic mechanisms for blurring borders, meanings, logics, and categories so that we can explore ways of (re)arranging our realities otherwise – through intimate, poetic, and vibratory states. The work is based on the poem “La Contadora” by Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, a poem that was translated to English by Ursula Le Guin (titled “The Teller of Tales” in English). The poem is the first membranal operation enacted by this piece, offering a South-North dialogue and a link between realms of science fiction and poetry. Mistral’s poem signals the importance of listening – attuning oneself to otherness and to the many stories that build our realities, beginning with the lines:  

Cuando camino se levantan / todas las cosas de la tierra / y me paran y cuchichean / y es su historia lo que cuentan.

When I’m walking, everything / on earth gets up / and stops me and whispers to me, / and what they tell me is their story. (1-4)

The poem centers on stories that are whispered from above, below, and all around us in unknown languages. As L’Huillier reflects, “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.” This work was originally commissioned by Kunsthalle Baden Baden (2022) and the version presented in Coro is a fragment of the original piece.

*text revised by curator Maya Hayda for Coro exhibition at PS122 Gallery, NYC)

*Cuchicheos [Fragmento] was commissioned by Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 for the Inner Ear(th) exhibition at Het HEM, curated by Maud Seuntjens.