HECHIZAS
(2023)
HECHIZAS. Screaming Machines: Artistic Research in the Soundscape and the Loudspeaker- Objects of Bogotá´s Street Commerce is a project that is articulated within a personal research process, around the sound of street commerce in different cities. Especially in Bogota, my fascination for the itinerant trade lies in the tensions implied by its sonorous occupation of public space, linked to the stigma of the informal, illegal and invasive.
This project, HECHIZAS, conjures its existence at the moment it goes out into the public space, questioning the margins that are established in sound environments from listening and presence and the processes of decontextualization, also the voices, their translation or noise; the ways in which public space is inhabited from the legal/// illegal/// agreed upon; the forms of appropriation and personalization of space; among others.
Walking through the city has allowed me to establish a relationship of listening and dialogue with its sounds, guided at times by curiosity and what we call hungry listening, I have accumulated over the years a sound archive of the street: sounds of itinerant commercial activity and voices that are familiar in this soundscape. This sound archive, of the public space, specifically for this project, of downtown Bogotá is marked by the itinerancy of street commerce, this modality of informal work exposes the economic inequality and the porosity of the capitalist system, at the same time. The street trader exercises a form of resistance and activism, by reiterating with the sound of his presence every day the fragility of our welfare. In an unequal society it is necessary for people to seek sustenance by going out to sell, as much as it is urgent a “pirate”[1] consumerism, because acquiring a product is expensive. It is a strange relationship, which of “scavenging”[2] and popular inventiveness, all deployed in the daily life of the street.
HECHIZAS has been configured from the admiration and as a tribute to the popular inventiveness that crystallizes in the mobile devices of street vendors, in the affected expressions, the prerecorded loud voices, which sound defying allowed decibels. Within this jungle of accents, we recognize the narrative of the Bogotá town crier Miguel Rincón, without his blessing, this project would not be possible.
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[1] In some Latin American countries, pirate is understood as buying something pirated, like acquiring something on the black market, it can be something that is a brand copy. Pirate can be a book that was reproduced without authorization in a cheaper edition.
[2] In the labor context, "rebusque" means to make an effort to find a livelihood even if one does not have a formal job, to have the will to do any type of work to support oneself economically.
