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Current Activism Trends in Sound Art and Electroacoustic Music in Mexico and
Colombia

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 Current Activism Trends in Sound Art and Electroacoustic Music in Mexico
and Colombia
Juan Carlos Vasquez
University of Virginia
juan.vasquez@virginia.edu
ABSTRACT
This study attempts to provide a current report of activism
in forms of artistic expression in Latin America within the
fields of electroacoustic music and sound art. Given the
non-existent dedicated literature documenting related ex-
amples in this specific topic, we chose focusing in Mex-
ico and Colombia as case studies for this paper, consider-
ing the authors’ close connection and artistic trajectory in
both of these countries.
1. INTRODUCTION
Composers from the Latin American region face a vari-
ety of unique social challenges in order to exercise their
profession. According to Londono et al., a composer in
Latin America is ”isolated, subjected to financial instabil-
ity, and prone to be distracted or face activism” [1]. From
this point of view, engaging in activism through music is
viewed less as a choice and more of an inadvertent byprod-
uct to the difficult social conditions for a musician across
the region. However, over the decades, Latin American
music has had a prolific relationship with activism outside
of academia in a variety of ways, including political ac-
tivism from ”alternative” musical ensembles [2], protest
song in Spanish or ”New Latin American Song” [3] and
mainstream music acts that advocate for national identity
and political resistance [4] [5].
This study will focus on activism in forms of artistic ex-
pression in the intersection of music and technology from
a contemporary art perspective. The main challenge for
such a study is the non-existent dedicated academic liter-
ature documenting the relationship between activism and
electroacoustic music or sound art in the region, either in
English or Spanish. Moreover, Dal Farra mentions [6] how
preservation is not a widespread practice among both insti-
tutions and electroacoustic music composers, making very
challenging to find documentary material of specific works
within the field, yet alone cataloguing them by content.
Being this the initial attempt to build a current report of
activism and electroacoustic music in the region, we chose
focusing in Mexico and Colombia for this study, consid-
ering our close connection and trajectory in both of these
countries.
Copyright:
2020
c Juan Carlos Vasquez et al. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License 3.0 Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are
credited.
Omar Fraire
University of Virginia
omar.fraire@virginia.edu
2. MEXICO
The Mexican society faces today a diverse number of re-
alities that configure a complex social topography for the
vast majority of the population. Some examples include
the lack of opportunities for upward socioeconomic mobil-
ity [7], a pervasive poverty rate [8] and indigenous people
being displaced and exploited by drug cartels [9]. Sim-
ilarly, different instances of institutional political power
continuously face social protests and the threat of orga-
nized armed groups that have emerged along the country
to advocate for better living conditions and denounce what
they consider to be the state’s failures [10].
Within that context, the frameworks for artistic produc-
tion get sculpted in an individual basis, owed in part to
the diverse ways in which artists choose to define power
relations within their immediate context [11]. One partic-
ular event served as a milestone for the relationship of art,
music and activism: a student protest violently repressed
by the government in 1968, causing many fatal casual-
ties [12]. Particularly in the field of music technology,
Composer Manuel Rocha suggested that this event could
have caused a rupture with tradition, paving the way for
the development of electroacoustic music in Mexico [13].
Since then, a myriad of socially-engaged styles associ-
ated with the field have surfaced. Recent examples in-
clude emerging composer Liliana Rodriguez, who consid-
ers activism as an activity that goes beyond composing
music about it. In Instalación (Installation), premiered in
2017, Rodriguez uses recordings of a woman from Oax-
aca who talks about the acts of domestic violence she has
gone through. Liliana performs live processing on the au-
dio source and ’invades’ a frequently busy public space
with the sonic result [14]. Other artists have decided to en-
gage in the critical transformation of national symbols such
as sound artist Ivan Abreu in m(rpm) Mexican National
Anthem (2014), where a version of the national anthem
recorded during the president Echeverrı́a period (1970-1976)
is engraved on a frozen disc and played back on a turntable
until it breaks. According to the author, this process is
a sonic representation of the ”disappearance of national
identity” [15].
Composers have also participated in collective experi-
ments of using music as a form of protest, including works
such as Paisaje Sonoro Anti-Peña (Soudscape against Peña) [16]
where the president in turn is symbolically rejected through
the composition by multiple composers. México 2014 [17],
also collectively composed, is intended as a protest against
the contemporary mexican social situation as a whole. Both
pieces include texts as material, and are structured collab-
oratively with a common political purpose presented in its
different phases as online pieces.
Another project worth mentioning is the Guggenheim Aguas-
calientes Museum, a large collective work started by the
artist Rolando López which critically follows the Guggen-
heim family’s ”imperialist and exploitative” impact in Mex-
ico [18]. Within that context, Omar Fraire created Cha-
pareke Hidrocálido, a body of work consisting in the cre-
ation of an instrument inspired by the Chapareke, an eth-
nic string instrument used by the Ramamuri, a group of
indigenous people in Mexico [19]. As an act of resistance,
Fraire’s instrument was built using a root from a tree taken
down in the process of construction of the Avenida Aguas-
calientes, a large avenue in the region. In Onorúame (fig-
ure 1), the instrument is performed in conjunction with live
electronics [20].
Figure 1. Finding relations with Chapareke Hidrocálido. The indigenous
instrument in interaction with new techniques of sound production.
During our research, we found that some contemporary
composers consider the creative decisions taken around the
composition process as a political act. Is in this sense, the
electroacoustic work of German Romero exists as an ac-
tion against the imposition of standard software and the
aesthetics derived from them [21]. Furthermore, for some
contemporary composers like Romero, activism is noth-
ing more but a tag used to navigate the cultural market;
a posture he does not believe in. He points out that we
don’t need to be activists in Mexico as we can find, in his
opinion, ways to circumvent the state institutions and act
without restrictions in any way desired [22]. Rogelio Sosa
also questions the possibility of an activism movement in
Mexico given the privileged conditions of the contempo-
rary and experimental music scene [23], but part of his
work remains sensitive to contemporary social situations:
Interior III - Resonancias aurales de la necrocultura (Inte-
rior III - Aural Resonances from necro-culture) is a sound-
scape made out of torture sounds. Sosa nullifies the vi-
sual element of the environment by asking the audience
to use a black bag on their heads [24]. Environmental
concerns are also present in current activism among music
technologists, albeit in a lesser proportion. Among those
are the Mexican composers Nashim Ximena Gargari [25]
and Christopher Luna-Mega [26] who develop music with
an environmentalist approach. Significantly, this kind of
work has been developed outside of Mexico.
Finally, in spite of the lack of an exhaustive compilation
of work related to our topic of study, we did find the exis-
tence of some more general archiving initiatives. These ef-
forts include the articles in the compilation (Ready) media
[13] written by two Mexican sound artists (Manuel Rocha
and Israel Martı́nez), and the independent work archiv-
ing sound experiments in Mexico by the artist Rolando
Hernández at his Centro de Creación Archivo y Difusión
de Documentos de Arte Sonoro en México (Center for Cre-
ation, Archive and Diffusion of Documents of Sound Art
in Mexico) [27]
3. COLOMBIA
Similar to Mexico, Colombia has also had a particularly
difficult relationship with violence, including long-standing
episodes of asymmetric warfare between the Government,
paramilitary groups and subversive armed groups of com-
munist ideology [28]. The reasons of organized violence
in Colombia are of complex nature and diverse origin [29].
In combination with violence originated as a result of drug-
traffickers, Colombia has suffered an endemic phenomenon
of internal displacement [30] affecting mostly rural popu-
lation, but also minority groups such as indigenous com-
munities [31]. Composers in Colombia have explored
the unique social challenges that a situation as the above
causes by directly addressing violence in their works, but
also tangentially by speaking of other particularly Colom-
bian issues at the periphery of the armed conflict.
Jorge Gregorio Garcia’s work focuses in reflecting about
”memory, Colombian inner conflict and violence”. His
piece La Historia de Nosotros (The Story/History of Us),
finished in 2013, is a 81-minute electroacoustic music work
divided in four movements for a solo percussionist and
eight-channel speaker ring set-up without a center speaker.
La Historia de Nosotros main premise is an artistic take on
a ”corpus of mythological and historical chronicles” [32],
aka. the collective memory of the Huitoto, an aboriginal
tribe that was systematically repressed and decimated dur-
ing the 20th Century [33]. Similarly, his cycle ”Nuestras
crónicas, memorias del 9 de abril” (Our chronicles, mem-
oirs from April 9th), composed between 2016 and 2018
also takes as a departure point testimonials, this time from
citizens surrounding the events of the 9th of April of 1948.
In that date, known as ”El Bogotazo”, widespread violent
protests emerged after the assassination of left-wing politi-
cian Jorge Eliecer Gaitan [34].
Composer and sound artist Juan Carlos Vasquez also worked
primarily with testimonials in his installation / interface
”Máquina M.” (2011) The installation (figure 2) has 5 mod-
ules of sonic manipulation, each one with a different oral
recorded testimonial organized in chronological order. The
central theme is related to the “Plan Condor” (Operation
Condor), an international agreement to exterminate com-
munist movements in Chile, Argentina, Brasil, Uruguay,
and Bolivia between 1973 and 1985, with the indirect par-
ticipation of Colombia, Peru and Venezuela [35]. Sev-
eral stories from survivors and/or protagonists of this pe-
riod were compiled and assigned to each of the modules,
which could be operated by the audience or used as a new
musical interface for electroacoustic music improvisation
[36].

Figure 2. First performance of Maquina M. during the practice-based re-
search project ”Telestesia” (2012) at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá
Composer Santiago Lozano created a modular opera called
”Violeta” premiered in 2017 as a result of three years of
conversations with victims of the Colombian internal con-
flict [37]. However, ”Violeta” does not include record-
ings from the subjects interviewed, rather focusing in the
intimate perspective of a main fictitious character [38].
Another project that also worked with case studies is the
embodied system INTIMAL, for which sound artist Xi-
mena Alarcón, as part of a working team, compiled an oral
archive of migratory experiences, shared by Colombian
migrant women who experienced the Colombian armed
conflict [39].
While political postures seem to be majoritarian in the
composers engaged in activism, there are examples of ad-
vocacy for different topics. Composer Ana Maria Romano
directs and organizes the ”En Tiempo Real” festival, which
campaigns for female participants both as an invited artists
and as part of the work team [40]. In addition, researcher
Juan Fernando Velasquez interprets Romano’s piece “El
Suelo desde el Viento” as a multisensorial experience that
can provide an alternative understanding of nature, as a
contrast of what he calls ”hegemonic narratives of bio-
diversity” in Colombia [41]. In terms of incorporating
reflections about gender in their work, other example is
transmedia artist Feli Cabrera López, who describe her artis-
tic practice as a reflection of her life, ”a constant confronta-
tion against binary culture” [42].
On the other hand, is worth to mention that electroacous-
tic music activism in Colombia currently has exponents
that do not refer to the specific context of the country. Ri-
cardo Arias, Associate Professor at the Universidad de los
Andes in Bogotá defines his work as ”anarchist and anti-
hierarchical”, music that resists to be confined into a pre-
planned structure and of mainly improvisatory nature [43].
Arias militant posture against formal decisions is based on
the concept of meta-music by British percussionist Eddie
Prévost [44], in which during an improvisation each mu-
sician imbues their musical part with an ”inner capacity to
transform itself”, what Michael T. Bullock calls the seed
of the concept of ”self-idiomatic music” [45]
4. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
The examples above, while not exhaustive, show a general
overview on recent projects that tackle the idea of activism
in one way or another, in a region where the mere action
of becoming a composer could be considered an act of po-
litical resistance. Our study had a number of takeaways,
among them discovering that the conceptions of activism
in sound art and music maintain heterogeneous approaches
and attitudes towards this practice. Far from being a dis-
advantage, the multiple definitions and practical applica-
tions of what ’activism’ could entail enrich immensely the
practice of electroacoustic music in a context with simi-
lar political, economical and societal concerns as is Latin
America.
Similarly, most of the topics covered by the artists en-
gaged in a form of activism are more often related to their
immediate social reality, rather than influenced by current
global trends of activism in topics such as climate change.
In most cases, as well, most of their individual productions
tend not to be exclusively related with activism.
Finally, albeit is possible to find several relevant works
in a number of archival compilations, there is still a lack
of a dedicated taxonomy on the conceptions and practices
of activism in sound art and electroacoustic composition
both in Mexico and Colombia. There is an urgent need for
institutions and researchers to document extensively these
artistic practices, both in Spanish and English, in order to
give them appropriate visibility, amplifying the potential
(and more often than not, intended) societal impact.
Acknowledgments
We would like to show our immense appreciation to the
electroacoustic music communities of both Colombia and
Mexico for their valuable help gathering the examples here
documented.
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