Vorágine/Vortex/Maelstrom
(2023)
La Vorágine is the title of the novel (1924) by Colombian writer José Eustasio Ribera. It reveals the elements that make up the Colombian imaginary linked to the word vortex. It is a story, in the key of historical tale and fiction that uses a romantic plot to address the violent exploitation of the territory and human bodies during the "rubber fever" in the Amazon. Vorágine is at the same time turbulence of emotions, powerful natural force and violent exploitation. I am interested in taking up this word from its cultural signifier to follow the dialogue between territory and human modes of permanence.
Although the novel is set in the early twentieth century, today the situation has not changed so much. The rubber rush, the gold rush, the lithium rush, and a long etcetera of unbalanced relationships between those who dispossess ethnic communities and take over the land, assuming the land, the communities and the population that migrates in search of work as resources to be exploited. Surely, we could engage in a dialogue where the terms decolonial, extractivism and sovereignty would come to the surface. I think of this floating quality that words have, I imagine a floating voice and the ways to listen to it. Ethnic peoples who have not yet lost the connection with the territory and the ancestral cosmogony embody in their own bodies the dynamics of listening and rooted enunciation. They do not suffer from the evil of deterritorialization in their own bodies and identities. Those of us who move away from the navel of the territory can forget how our own voice sounds and in this loss, we forget how to listen. We must therefore do hard work to refine again the instrument of perception and listen to the other in its own terms.
The proposal asks questions about the relationship between listening and voice; between the dynamics of domestication and acclimatization; between discovering-discovering and camouflaging-camouflaging; between exploiting, extracting, expropriating and existing. It is also a personal search in the midst of walking and floating between two distant sound territories ¿how to sound? ¿How to listen to the other?
The project was configured in three moments: I Suit. As a metaphor of the relationship between subject and environment. Body in relation to territory. II. Sound artefacts. Permeable listening between one's own voice and the voices of the territory. Audible presence of other territories. III. Walking. The exercise of walking without the need of specific orientation, contemplative drift, discovering and remaining.
The sounds of the piece come from two positions: a) soundscape recordings in a natural area of Berlin and soundscape recorded in Tuta-Boyacá Colombia b) the sounds that are recorded in situ through the portable device to record and reproduce.
The piece is an installation composed of an audiovisual material (recording of the action of walking and listening/sounding) and a sound object (the suit with the devices).
