Sound installation for The XI Premio Luis Caballero, El Parqueadero / Museo Banco de La República, Bogotá, Colombia. 2022.
To unpick a history book of Colombia. Unpicking it is not removing the seams or leaves, but rather removing its words, separating them out, returning them to their initial state, to what they were alone, without other words or context. Taking out the words one by one is undoing the book’s narrative. This disentangled information is put through AI software that rewrites the words and weaves another text and structure, reshaping history, re-editing memory. Then the words pass into an audible form: the human voice. The initial book is both the substance and the spark that ignites the score.
This history is spoken by a plural voice – as if heard at a demonstration or protest – but also a voice multiplied and divided in time and space. Sounds from all directions envelop the listener; voices, organic and synthetic, escape before we can fix their meaning, before we understand what the voices ‘say’. Sounds are generated from the human voice – analysed, fragmented, re-composed in a sonorous drift as habitual reference points remain stubbornly hidden behind red curtains. Voices expose history without narrating it, orienting us towards possible routes without indicating a path. In this temporality without beginning or end, it is possible to think of the time of revolution, the time of “tomorrow a peace”. This “tomorrow” is a revolutionary commitment to the continuous construction of a collective freedom through the plural voices reflecting on their history. A revolution always to come.
Each time the work is presented, the physical installation changes to fit the new space and the sound content is re-edited for the new setting.
Credits: Sound Installation by Maria Isabel Arango. Created in collaboration with sound artist Lucrecia Dalt and architecture office Taller Síntesis. All the people in the sound piece gave their anonymous voices to form an echo of one.
Produced with additional support from CoCrea.