Sound Art

My academic and professional paths have brought me to music, technology and research. I have worked as a performer, composer, and sound engineer and I have focused my practice on exploring the correlation between space and sound. I’m interested in the aesthetic outcomes of the relationship between sound, space and art.

You will find here some examples of the work I have done in the past years. The following art pieces have been showcased in the UK, Colombia and the United Arab Emirates.

Mismatched Milieux:

Exploring Intersections of Superimposed Spaces

Mismatched Milieux is a sound art installation that expressed the relationship between architectural spaces, culture and sound. The purpose of the piece was to magnify the intersections of the superimposition between a designed virtual space and a real space. The first one being a cathedral and the latter The Bedouin Tent in London UK. 

The superimposition of the spaces is achieved by the location and characteristics of the tent, the production of soundscapes, the creative manipulation of reverberation, and the use of sound's symbolic meanings. A 3D loudspeaker arrangement, a light system, and the fabrication of a fake choir enhanced the experience. 

The installation's structure of six scenes allows the exploration of different rooms in the imaginary cathedral, which emphasises the possible junction areas between the overlapped locations. 

This experience explores the influence of architecture in sound and music aesthetics and sound art installations as a manifestation of such. Mismatched Milieux uses sound like a familiar language to people in the Western world. 

I designed the experience, composed the songs, performed the fake choir, recorded the dialogues and mixed the piece.

You can find here a Binaural version of the installation, don’t forget to listen with headphones!

Still Life

— fragile choreography of clouds—

This piece is part of a collaborative project with artist Mario Santanilla showcased at Sharjah Art Foundation in 2019 in Sarja, United Arab Emirates. 

"Mario Santanilla elaborates on his extensive and interconnected research into the ways that the built environment moulds human beings. His interest in this topic has led him to explore climate control systems, the agency of operational colour models, and the physical and mental effects of artificial light. Building on his earlier observations of the particular way zoo animals behave in their enclosures, he visited zoos, aquariums and wildlife centres in Colombia, the United States and the United Arab Emirates. He shifted his focus to visitors' facilities, the main spaces around which everything revolves, where the largest amount of energy is consumed, and the most maintenance is needed. Santanilla recorded these buildings using a thermo-sensitive camera originally designed for construction and building repair. The low quality of the camera image worked against its functionality; movement was fractured, and colours blurred, juxtaposed and intertwined. Glass windows became mirrors. Still life —fragile choreography of clouds–– unfolds as a double-sided projection, in which sound and montage choreograph a revealing expression of transitoriness, generating a different interpretation and understanding of dwelling by opening up the possibilities of expanding beyond the predominant light-sensitive Ultra HD vision of the world." (Santanilla, 2019)

I was in charge of the musical composition, sound design and mixing process for Still Life. The sound was produced taking into consideration "Air conditioner motors merged with those of vacuum cleaners, visitors' voices and the slapping of windows next to motionless animals" heard in the zoos (Santanilla, 2019).

This Is How Things Die

This piece is part of a collaborative project with artist Mario Santanilla. This work was showcased at Espacio Odeón in 2018 in Bogotá, Colombia. 

This Is How Things Die (Así mueren las cosas), explores the building where Espacio Odeon is. Mario Santanilla starts from that mythology of the place to ask about how memory and its images are built. How things are created, that is, how they appear in the world, how they happen, what makes them be where we see them, what makes them intelligible, for whom, why? What are the constructions and stories that locate and intend to define and apprehend the origins of something? This project is the result of an exhaustive investigation of the building and Bogotá history. It is a reflection on the memory of the representation mechanisms that it has. 

The proposed tour of the Espacio Odeón does not intend to make visible a fact or a reality, but it instead builds a new space. This place goes beyond materiality; it is a simulation." (Odeon, 2019).

I was in charge of the composition, sound design, and mixing process of the track behind the voice-over. 

The Noise of Time

This video is part of a collaborative project with artist Alberto Miani. The Time's Noise (El ruido del tiempo) and other works completed the exhibition that took place at SGR Galería in 2018, in Bogotá, Colombia.

The noise of time is the disciplined repetition of an obsessive mechanism, changes harmoniously from a minor to a major chord to return to the minor. Each cell presented is repeated until one of its notes moves. The movement, the change, tries to hide until the repetition shows it. Another note of the cell moves, changes, hides, repeats, shows until it ends where it begins. It is not illogical to think that the process is infinite, although it is absurd to think so. In any case, it is not an endless circle, there are several possible changes. The noise of time is hopelessly finite: it begins, extends and ends, irreversibly.

I composed, performed and mixed the piece.

mariage blanche

Mariage Blanc, the infamous play by acclaimed Polish playwright, Tadeusz Rozewicz and translated by his good friend Adam Czerniawski had its first British production in October 2018, at Asylum Chapel, in London, UK.

Mariage Blanc tells the story of Bianca, a young woman who has been brought up as a boy only to be married off upon her coming of age. Facing the torment of burgeoning womanhood and the sexual expectations of marriage, Bianca becomes increasingly consumed by surreal phallic visions while clinging to childhood remnants. Acclaimed Polish film Director Andrzej Wajda hailed Mariage Blanc as "a fairy tale for adults". At the same time, Artur Lundkvist an influential member of the Nobel Laureate Swedish Academy Jury derided it as "overly erotic". For us, this is a surrealist dark comedy un-afraid to explore the taboo, the unsavoury and the erotic through the lens of sisterhood - all with tenderness and humour. Rozewicz himself wrote it as part of "a fight for freedom".  

Mariage Blanc is a tragic farce imbued with complexity and has been studied internationally in the fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, postmodernism, identity politics and gender. Set in late 19th Century Poland, the play places these contemporary themes and progressive heroine against the backdrop of the archaic patriarchal rules of the time. 

I was a music and sound assistant to composer Marina Elderton in the live shows.