The work’s second strategy involves a decolonial shift from the visual-representational paradigm. Vázquez argues that modernity affirms the subject as the center of a "total optical system." A traditional score functions within this system as a fixed, visual blueprint demanding faithful representation, a "script" for a singular sonic reality.
True Negatives systematically subverts this. It rejects fixed pitches in favor of registral gestures (using a trigram for high, middle, and low registers) and relative durations (“long note,” “short note” and “very short note”). Because of the module construction and open instrumentation, the score ceases to be a map of a predetermined sonic reality. It becomes, instead, a framework for a relational event. The performance notes explicitly ask for "asynchronous polyphonic textures" formed by individual interpretations. In this sense, I interpret the "cyclical execution modules" not as literal repetitions but revisitations: each return is a unique echo that brings transformation, memory, and difference. As I observed across all performances, no iteration is identical(see and listen to example 2,3 and 4.) yet each cycle retains the trace of the previous as an echo of temporal coexistence. These differences, which I call revisitations, emerge from the individual and create a collective result. Each interpreter imagines a contextualized repetition, thinking about the ensemble and musical dynamics, so their “revisitation” is shaped by individual expression, but modulated by a sense of community.
This resonates directly with what Vázquez calls relational time, a temporality of encounter and copresence, opposed to the empty, homogeneous time of the state’s narrative. The “truth” of True Negatives migrates from the visual domain to the page of the aural-relational domain of the performance. There is no single, correct "view" of the piece. As Donna Haraway notes, the "god trick" of seeing everything from nowhere is impossible. In True Negatives, all participants are embedded within the collective sound they are creating. The composition thus enacts a "decolonial aesthesis": a liberation of perception from the hegemony of the visual, opening a space for relational temporalities, the time of listening, negotiation, and communal presence.
Here, I think Enrique Dussel’s notion of exteriority complements Vázquez’s framework. For Dussel, the ethical task of decolonial thought is to listen to the “exterior”, the lives and memories excluded by modernity’s totalizing narrative. The Other is not merely different; it is constitutive of our being. Acosta’s compositional practice, which redistributes authorship and invites performers into a space of shared responsibility, can be read as an enactment of Dussel’s ethics of exteriority. In this sense, True Negatives is not about representing the victims of the false positives but about constructing a relational space where their silenced presence, the trace, can resonate ethically, not mimetically. Listening becomes a political act of exteriority.
Example2(b).Verdaderos Negativos excerpt, performed by Ensamble CG members. (4 interpreters version).
Example 4(d).Verdaderos Negativos excerpt, performed by Ensamble CG members. (4 interpreters version).