From culture to nature and back. A personal journey through the soundscapes of Colombia
(2020)
author(s): Lamberto Coccioli
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies, Birmingham City University
The purpose of this essay is twofold: to celebrate the astonishing richness and diversity of Colombia’s natural and human soundscapes, and to reconstruct the process through which my direct experience of those soundscapes has influenced my own creative work as a composer. Reflecting on a long personal and intellectual journey of discovery that plays out on many levels – musical, anthropological, aesthetical – helps bring to the fore important questions on music composition as the locus of cultural appropriation and reinterpretation. How far can the belief system of a distant culture travel before it loses its meaning? From a post-colonial perspective, can a European composer justify the use and repurposing of ideas, sounds and songs from marginalised indigenous communities? In trying to give an answer to these questions through the lens of my own experience I keep unravelling layer upon layer of complexity, in a fascinating game of mirrors where my own identity as a "Western" composer starts crumbling away.
El paisaje sonoro de la memoria como forma de resiliencia. El caso de la violencia en Colombia.
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Estefanía Díaz Ramos
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Conflict and violence in Colombia have been a recurrent problem for more than sixty years in the territory. This has not only affected the spheres that have historically disputed political power, but also more than 8 million ordinary people who, as a result of the invisibilisation and systematic silencing of their experiences, have seen their memories relegated to the spectrum of what we call noise here, as something uncomfortable that nobody wants to listen to.
This exhibition is the result of a research process that has sought to highlight different ways in which sound has become an artistic tool of empowerment for victims in processes that, in addition to promoting exercises in resilience, have managed to connect with "deaf ears" when it comes to breaking with the old, homogenous and silencing discourses of memory, through what could be called a de-sensitisation by means of sound art.
Starting from the study and characterisation of how subaltern everyday experience and its dissemination - through sonority as raw material for re-memory in scenarios of violence - allow us to reveal strategies of connection between memories, through collective and vernacular sound production; we have sought to determine some of the characteristics, both physical and conceptual, that make up what would be a soundscape of memory.
Finally, this research project aims not only to identify different aspects of these new narratives of resilient memory through sound art, but also to invite a conscious listening to the different ways of sounding that make room for silenced memories, and highlight the construction of this new soundscape, the product of a confrontation with the hegemonic discourse through sonority in Colombia.
Taller de Champeta
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Gigi
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A champetear fue un taller realizado durante el mes de agosto de manera virtual como manera de compartir mi aproximación personal de la champeta y la manera como la he investigado y vivido en la práctica.
Fue un taller para compartir la energía de esta danza durante épocas complejas, volviendo a esa raíz de las danzas afrocaribeñas de la resistencia y resiliencia.