Son[i]a
Jaume Ferrete
In a body of work that encompasses the creation of texts, recordings, performances, concerts, websites, listening sessions, educational workshops, and archives of conversations, Jaume Ferrete explores everything that affects and influences the ideologies of the voice. His projects openly refrain from naturalising identity and address vocal production as a complex social phenomenon, shaped by the surrounding echoes and reverberations.
In this podcast, Jaume Ferrete talks about Helen Harper, about the bodily discipline of telephone operators, and about the Voder as a clear example of drag. He cites deafness as a crucial phenomenon fuelling the history of sound technologies and connects some key moments—from the Voder to WaveNet—in the development of voice synthesis technologies.
Marc Vives
It’s not just that Marc Vives’s work eludes categories and concise descriptions, which it does. Rather, it is like a kind of art of elusion itself, a tenacious and obstinate exercise in dodging limits and clear formalisations. His is a generative systems art, an alchemy of closeness, a kind of cartomancy that zeroes in on social relations and interpersonal connections. And It tends to put pressure on the logic of the white cube and the logic of cultural management, one thing on top of the other, all at once. In this podcast we talk to Marc Vives about swimming, about nerves, about floors stripped of paint, and about strategies for eschewing comfort and courting risk and emptiness in the usually safe environment of the art world.
Cecilia Bengolea
Multidisciplinary artist Cecilia Bengolea sees dance as a tool and a medium for empathy and emotional exchange. She is particularly interested in anthropological research on contemporary and archaic forms of dance, and devotes herself to learning techniques, movements, and choreographies from around the world, using them to shape her own artistic vocabulary: an embodied movement and dance archive—built up individually and collectively—, in which the body becomes an animated sculpture for performance, video, and installations. In this podcast, Cecilia Bengolea talks about her life journey, a state between constant flux and sensual impulse that draws on Thai boxing and pole dancing as well as contemporary dance and dancehall.
Jessica Ekomane
Jessica Ekomane is a sound artist and composer, and a lecturer in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Ekomane’s quadraphonic performances and installations approach algorithmic/computer music as a social practice that is grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics, and explores listening expectations and their societal roots. In this podcast, we talk about the freedom of play, eMule, pipe organs, the limitations and flexibility of Max/MSP, early non-Western sound synthesis, DIY research, quotas, minimalism, and her early love for Ligeti and Destiny's Child.
Clàudia Pagès
The work of artist Clàudia Pagés unfolds and contracts in many forms. Words, the body, and movement circulate in multiple directions through her processes, forging a tangled linguistic web of micro-narratives that involve critically listening to the immediate environment, and recording it through persistent writing. In this podcast, we open Clàudia Pagés’s box of tricks and tools. Repetition, 'zoom-ins', physical and metaphorical shifts, and translation emerge as some of her main strategies, while singing, composing, and dancing come together as desire and a pure space of experimentation and possibility.