The pandemic forces our bodies and territories to experience them from the virtual point of view, whenever possible interacting on the physical plane. A new doctrine of control of the body is deployed, which forces us to social distancing and paradoxically gives us overcrowding in the private sphere. It pushes us into virtual life, out of fear of material death, these tensions between materiality and virtuality have been radically established worldwide. However, in Latin America, we live a dislocated modernity, that makes it difficult to imagine the virtuality of all bodies and spaces.

«[e.] spaciario» was born from the need to rethink and relocate the relationship between body, territory, space, and virtuality. The platform hosts eight creative processes from Bolivian collectives and creators. Through multiple formats, the sphere in which their works coexist, create, and produce is reflected. The proposal is based on a system that records, processes, and reproduces spatial audio in 360 degrees, allowing festival visitors to have an immersive 360º sound experience. The development includes the platform for each listening room, designed and expanded with various materials provided by the artists (images, videos, photos, texts) with access from any mobile device, computer and browser. The experience will be progressively expanded through the accessories that each visitor has, such as hearing aids, multi-channel system, virtual reality glasses, etc. The development of this technology encourages the use of open code, and seeks to generate an exciting and innovative experience for the perception of visitors, displaying the sensation of movement and proprioception. The objective is to take the tool to the maximum to share environments and spaces with visitors.

Sonandes is a platform dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary sound practices, bringing together creators who research, develop and exhibit projects associated with sound, perception and the study of the senses. It promotes production and research as a path of collective knowledge and thought adopting multiple formats and strategies such as: Puertos: Program of creation residencies, laboratories, training processes and publications and Sonandes Bienal Internacional de Arte Sonoro (2014, 2016, 2018, 2020).

Artists bios and links

Adriana Aramayo: «Cuarenpena»

«Cuarenpena» is a sound journal built with sounds collected during my own strict quarantine experience. The journal displays a counterpoint between text and sounds, always between the gaze of one’s self and the soundscape of that self that inhabits a confined body, like many others in the state of quarantine, and like few in the privileged position of having access to water, food, technology or to art. In «Cuarenpena», sound articulates generating a situational binary juxtaposition with different connotations (inside and outside, mind and body, home and street, the permitted space and the prohibited space, an individual space and a denied community space, and also an intimacy invaded by the public sphere embodied in the omnipresence of State control and abuse), through a semantic game of sound, emotion and the national socio-political context, to produce thoughts on the conflicts generated/deepened by the pandemic in our society, through an acoustic-body catharsis.

Music composer, sound artisan, and feminist. Adriana Aramayo graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Music (Composition and Conduction) from the Universidad Católica Boliviana «San Pablo» in La Paz. She has a postgraduate degree in «Reflections and proposals for the transformation of higher music education in Bolivia» from the Universidad de la Cordillera, La Paz. In Montevideo, she studied composition of art music and popular music, as well as the analysis of art music of the 20th and 21st centuries. She also studied classical and electric guitar, drums and piano at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in La Paz. She has composed music for animations, film soundtracks, theater music, chamber music, electro-acoustic music, music using electronic media in real-time, choral music, and songs. She is currently focused on composition, audio production, and music education.

Casa Taller y Ensamble Maleza: «un espacio vacío» 

«un espacio vacío» explores the acoustic peculiarities of an empty space and incorporates them into the sound discourse at a structural and expressive level. Most sounds are extinguished without leaving a palpable trace, we recall sounds or sounding situations reconstructing them, evoking a complex sensorial experience. We propose with this piece a non-nostalgic evocation of past sound events, that occurred in a given space, through the superposition of temporalities and the saturation of space.

Ensamble Maleza´s work focuses on the interpretation and dissemination of contemporary music created by composers from various backgrounds since 2011 in La Paz, Bolivia. The ensemble has also participated as ensemble-in-residence of various didactic concert cycles in Casa Taller, with the purpose of promoting instances of exchange between audience, creators, and interpreters. Ensamble Maleza currently works with composers interested in instrumental music with fixed or live electronics. Performers: Carla Derpic, Marcelo Gonzales, Carlos Nina, and Miguel Llanque.

Claudia Copa Mamani: «School by WhatsApp»

Since March 17, Bolivia began a strict quarantine, the students did not return to the classrooms since that date. The Ministry of Education instructed that classes take place virtually. The parents and students of Uru Ayparavi do not have the resources or the infrastructure to make this change in education, this situation generated a lot of tension and uncertainty in the community. At the beginning of August, the Bolivian government dictates the closure of the school year. «School by WhatsApp» is a community account of the impossibility of assuming virtual education in rural communities in Bolivia.

Claudia Copa Maman was born in 1993 in the Uru Ayparavi community, Uru Chipaya municipality, Sabaya province of the Oruro Department, Bolivia. She is part of the Uru Chipaya community, one of the oldest living cultures located in a territory between Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. The Urus have a very marked tradition in their clothing, architecture and language. Trained as a teacher at the «Caracollo Teacher Training School», in the city of Oruro, currently teaching the subjects of Cosmovisions, Philosophies, and Psychology, at the «Puente Topater» High School at the Uru Ayparavi community. Since 2018, she begins a training process in artistic resources, in 2019, together with his students and colleagues, she presents an artistic research in the exhibition «Babel: Tales of listening». Her production is related to the identity, traditions, and Chipaya language. From her practices, she keeps her culture alive.

Cristina Collazos: «Almuerzo familiar»

«Almuerzo familiar» is a portrait of the way to approach daily life in Bolivia. Not even the threat to death that we live, with the pandemic, causes any change in our ways of «life living». We have the virtue of adapting to any situation, but in our own way, by cheating, being rogue. We believe that we cheat everyone, but really, who are we kidding? «Almuerzo familiar» is a video call by Zoom, where 4 members of a family get together for lunch. This family lunch is made in the same environment, on the same table. Each family member has their own device that is initially the means through which they interact, gradually this medium is losing importance and they end up interacting ignoring it completely. The audio is the sound record of this lunch, live manipulated. Each location of the 4 family members is soundly isolated using contact microphones. There is a fifth channel that records the atmosphere of that moment including an FM radio of the place that plays during lunch. These channels are manipulated in different ways thus creating an ominous environment.

Cristina Collazos Cochabamba, Bolivia. With a degree in fine arts from the ARCIS University of Art and Social Sciences in Santiago, Chile, she is the co-creator of «DLP_electronics», a space for research and development of projects related to sound, art and electronics. She worked in different cinematographic and audiovisual projects, from the post-production and art direction area. She participated in several exhibitions in different galleries and participated in different international festivals of sound art and experimental music. She is currently collaborating with the INFRA project, the laboratory of other listening, drawing, helping in the vegetable garden, and bird watching.

INFRA: «Solo actions for listening through the body»

INFRA proposes the [e.] Spacial as a way to relate to space and the body, through the physicality of sound. The result of this research is a series of actions and experiences of liminal-immersive listening, where we rethink listening through the body, in the space that it inhabits daily.

INFRA: Explore the relationship deaf people establish with sound and vibration. The first laboratory is carried out with volunteers from the Cochabamba Deaf Association, the final piece opens the third edition of Sonandes: a biennial of sound art.

With the support of different institutions and international recognitions, laboratories are carried out in the cities of La Paz, Medellín, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo, bringing together various communities of deaf people in each city.

Victor Llaves is a young special education teacher. Victor developed a point system to write his own Braille version, participated in the INFRA workshop, and in this piece improvises with devices and writing.

Lluvia: «My four corners of circular energy»

«My four corners of circular energy» is an electroacoustic work based on the relationship between a series of music chords heard inside headphones and the sound of what’s going on daily life outside a building structure. Will these layers get together at some point? Will these layers create another layer in between? Let’s just try to deeply listen and answer.

Lluvia works as an independent cultural manager, organizing events in which audio and music are the main attraction. Master in Film Music: Musical Composition, Film Theory and Film Music, for Television and Audiovisual Media (At Beijing Film Academy). Major in Musical Composition and Orchestra Conducting (at Bolivian Catholic University). Finished major studies in Electronic Engineering, referred to Control Systems at UMSA (State Bolivian University).

Belén

The Canchón Belén is a market usually full of people and products. In the midst of the health crisis and especially the political crisis in Bolivia, the canchón is somewhat uninhabited. Somewhat because aside from most of the vendors, everything is still there. During pandemic here, we share the space of the market the same way we usually do but with chin straps and more plastic.

Luciana Decker  (1993, La Paz) studied anthropology and filmmaking. Recently she has finished a master in Bolivian and Latin-American literature. She made the film “Nana” in 2016, which had a good participation at international festivals. She also collaborated in a variety of Bolivian films as camerawoman, soundwoman, assistance and as a co-editor of “Nuevas Pornos” a magazine dedicated to Bolivian cinema.

Carlos del Águila Calle (Lima) considers himself a collaborator in creative processes related to visual and living arts with technical training in communication tools and performing arts. Nowadays, he resides in the city of La Paz – Bolivia, where he has served as an art director in different stagings. Some of his documentary shorts were part of film festivals

Proyecto Border: «Hacina*»

Three bodies in the same space, a home that becomes a living, latent and mutant organism. Three bodies forced to rethink themselves within this organism in symbiosis with all that inhabits and composes it. Three bodies that seek the necessary strategies to live together skillfully, reconfiguring the inhabited territory and being reconfigured by it. Overcrowding is seen from its sense of agglomeration, seeking to order chaos, like the harvest arranged side by side. Contact practices to return to the public space, having learned other ways of being together.

*feminine name Set of harvest bundles placed one on top of the other forming a pile.

Proyecto Border laboratory and works are understood as thinking machines self-referential, critical, and procedural manifestos about the reality of art, of the artist, of his modes of production and the culture industry. Proyecto Border, formed by Elena Filomeno, Juanqui Arévalo, and Paulina Oña, proposes to inhabit the liminal borders among the arts to blur them, hybridize them, cross them over to question them.

 

Curators:

espaciario.space

Guely Morató (BO)

Curator, cultural manager and researcher. She has a degree in Social Communication Sciences, specializing in Cultural Studies.

She has self-taught skills in the areas of electronics and programming. Since 2014, she directs SONANDES, art experimentation and research platform that promotes its international sound art biennial, with this same name.

She is the curator of PUERTOS: Creation Residency Program developed in six Bolivian cities. It is part of the international INFRA project, which investigates the relationship that deaf people establish with sound and vibration. She directs the Gender, Science and Technology Observatory, focused on the development of research and projects related to the gender gap in the field of technology and science. She is currently responsible for the project Sound Expressions of the Center for the Cultural Revolution (CRC) in La Paz, Bolivia.

Her work explores alternative methodologies for artistic research as well as the relationship between science, technology, and politics, with a strong emphasis on the study of perception.

A few key concepts within her work are Processes of collective creation, limits of perception, sound art, public space, gender, and technology.

 

Víctor Mazón Gardoqui (ES/DE)

Mazón Gardoqui’s work questions perception, altered state and vulnerability through un/stable arrangements.

His work materializes in three main fields: actions or site-specific performances through experimental processes, exhibitions as consequences of previous actions and collective work through collaborative groups, or seminars in cultural and academic centres.

Mazón Gardoqui has been a guest artist and lecturer at Slade School of Fine Art, Concordia University, Universität der Künste Berlin, Rijksakademie Amsterdam, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Superior Technical
School of Architecture of Madrid, Master Studies Interface Cultures Linz, University College London – Arts and Sciences, HFK Bremen University of Arts, Master Studies C:Art Media Valand Univ Goteborg, Institute of Dramatic Arts and Cultural Studies Casablanca, University Mohamed V Rabat, Patricio Lynch Universidad de Valparaíso, Universidad de Humanidades y Arte Concepción, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, MediaLAB Prado, LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre and Hangar.org, among others.

His work has been performed or exhibited in museums, biennials, galleries, billboards, urban screens and TV/radio stations in Africa, Russia, Nepal, North America, Canada, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Antarctica and numerous locations across Europe.