As I mentioned before, the approach to True Negatives cannot be homogeneous. The context of its commission, the composer’s idiosyncrasies, and the historical moment create a complex temporality where the control structures from the establishment, from the musical labels to political fantasies, are questioned. I argue that a look from a decolonial perspective is most appropriate.
Returning to the Asdrubal complaint, the rejection of labels highlights a central problem: being categorized according to market expectations. This “delinking" is a non-modern or “disobedient” move. Similarly, the false positives fantasy, which projects a scenario where only the official narrative is “real”, recalls the decolonial focus on the world that exists outside of modernity, not merely invisible but actively disguised and dismissed. From this perspective, modernity is unthinkable without its underside: coloniality. As Rolando Vazquez (2020) argues, “the awareness of the exteriority of modernity comes hand in hand with questioning its universal validity claims and its rule over ‘the real’” (p.). Modernity’s power lies in its ability to monopolize representation, to define what counts as real, visible, and temporal.
Through this lens, aesthetics, in its Kantian and Eurocentric form, functions as this mechanism of control. As Walter Mignolo (2011) argues, the Enlightenment’s invention of aesthetics was not merely philosophical, but regulatory: it organized the senses and perception according to European categories of beauty, order, and reason. The aesthetic became a tool for disciplining subjectivity. Decolonial aesthesis, by contrast, seeks to liberate perception, to recover embodied, communal, and non-visual modes of sensing and knowing (Vazquez, 2016).
This shift from aesthetics to aesthesis resonates with Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s critique of colonial aurality. In Aurality (2014), she writes “lettered elites constantly encountered sounding and listening practices that differed from their own: vocalities that seemed out of tune, improper accents, and noises coming from natural entities that seemed to overwhelm the senses.” (p.) Such forms of aurality disrupted the colonial desire for order and classification. In True Negatives, Acosta’s music opens an aural space where multiplicity and indeterminacy resist “visual fixation” of the modern gaze.
Central to Vázquez’s work is his notion of relational times. Modern temporality, he argues, is linear, empty, and progressive. It organizes the past as what has been surpassed, the present as pure presence, and the future as endless advancement. It is the temporality of what Benjamin called “empty homogeneous time,” the time of modernity’s forward motion.
Relational time, by contrast, “sees the past as actively constituting the present. The past is alive; it holds the memories of what has been denied and the suffering of oppression. It is the open colonial wound that speaks for justice” (Vázquez, 2015, p.250). This temporality is not about chronology but about co-presence, about the simultaneity of different temporal layers that coexist within lived experience. It is a time of encounter, not progress.
In Temporalidades relacionales: De la modernidad a lo decolonial, (2022), Vazquez proposes the huella (trace) as a metaphor for this relational temporality. The trace is not fully visible; “A memory that is never fully present, that is not perceptible in presence, that we can only intimately grasp in the fragility of the trace.” (p.34), a “fragile revelation” that gestures toward what has been erased. This metaphor of the trace is essential to understanding Acosta’s compositional ethics: True Negatives operates through traces, gestural fragments, open forms, recurring cycles that never return fully but echo previous presences.
Before continuing, I think it is crucial to clarify how this approach differs from other experimental traditions that, at first glance, might seem to share similar aims. In the second half of the 20th Century, composers and music thinkers such as Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, among others, worked on decentralizing authorship, promoting collective listening, and questioning the hierarchical structures of Western Art music. It is relevant to remark how inspirational these composers have been to the global musical community. However, their works operated primarily within an ‘intra-modern’ critique, addressing the internal contradictions of modernity rather than its colonial foundations. Olivero’s concept of Deep Listening, for example, reoriented musical attention toward relational awareness and the politics of sound, yet remained anchored in the Euro-American avant-garde’s lineage of individual spiritual and phenomenological inquiry. In contrast, the perspective guiding this study, which is articulated through thinkers like Rolando Vazquez, Walter Mignolo, and Enrique Dussel, frames listening as an epistemic and ethical gesture toward the exteriority of modernity, toward those histories and knowledges excluded by its universal claims. From this perspective, this also means that Acosta’s approach differs not only from the experimental avant-garde but also from the modernist ideology that thinkers like Theodor W. Adorno defended. In Philosophy of New Music (1949), Adorno upholds the autonomy of musical form as a critical space safeguarded within the institutions of modernity. This belief in the necessity of musical rationality creates an evident tension with Cage or Oliveros, who questioned authorship, institutionality, and perception within modernity. The decolonial perspective formulated in this research project seeks to listen from the outside of modernity, what modernity has rendered inaudible.
In this sense, True Negatives shares the openness of Oliveros’ or Cage’s works, but grounds that openness in a specific geopolitical consciousness: the aftermath of colonial violence and state fabrication of truth. The ensemble’s relational practice thus becomes more than a social experiment; it is an act of epistemic disobedience, a sonic enactment of what Vazquez calls Relational times, a temporality that listens to what modernity has silenced.