A través (Through)

echolocation instrument

Thoughts edited from a text message conversation

Walking through plaza de la dignidad the morning after Saturday October 19th–night of the first curfew–I stumbled upon a graffiti on a metallic curtain of a bank that read “What do we do to be listened to?” and I believe this work arises precisely from that impulse, of intertwining listening and doing.

Therefore it is a work that aims to present sound as an entanglement in which listening arises from doing, from creating the conditions to listen. Thus it questions notions of listening that place it as an unmediated form of access to materiality in itself. There I have a critique of sound practices that come from marginalising personal expression.

For my practice listening and personal expression go hand in hand, as expression is always and inevitably present. Therefore I believe that in my practice I try to give room to both listening and expression.

Personal expression permeates our listening adding a sound experience that is irreducible to listening. We might call this experience “dancing” and it has to do with personal volition, with expression, with making sound at will.

So what I am trying to create is a vacilar (oscillation) between “dancing” and “listening”.

This vacilar proposes a sound practice methodology that differs from the current dominant methodology that privileges listening and “removes” personal expression–In other words, that removes “dancing” or every sound agency that I willingly put forward.

Vacilar is a practice of creating instances of disorientation/ambiguity/reversibility between listening and dancing. So it could be understood through the act of echolocation. This act–used by bats, dolphins, doctors, submarines and others–consists in generating a sound and then listening to its propagation through space. That way you can determine your position in space and recognise other agencies present.

That is to say that through expressing sound (dancing) I generate listening and situate myself in space, in my social/natural context, etc.

The valuable thing about echolocation is that it proposes a human/non-human, nature/culture relationship that is constantly disoriented and rearticulated, as both hold each other and at the same time it keeps the dualism, it keeps the separation. That is to say, echolocation dilutes the distance between subject and context and simultaneously makes the separation evident.

Therefore this work could be understood as an echolocation instrument, and vacilar as a practice with a certain political urgency that arises from the necessity of not only listening but of making audible, through our dancing, through our noises and songs, as through expressing we achieve listening.

Gregorio Fontén, November 2019