“The urgent, always and not only after 500 years of nothing, is to interrogate our maps and readings and voices and landscapes. And to do it from the brightest side of our violent paradoxes.” This is how the poet Cristian Formoso writes in his text “Los 500 años y la metáfora del Estrecho”, whose beautiful and sharp words we read to try to find our own way of joining the collective work of raising critical views on the commemoration of the “discovery” (in many quotes) of the Strait of Magellan.
In this talk, we will propose a reflection on contemporary art as a critical interrogation and more specifically on sound art as a measure to interrogate maps, readings, voices and landscapes and finally to confront with history from an ecological and political perspective, where the peaceful or conflictual coexistence of the different forms of life (human and non-human) that exist in a territory becomes a prelude to the possibility of intercepting the deepest and most invisible levels of the territory itself and its processes of continuous historical transformation and cultural translation.
Within the various areas of contemporary art, sound art is configured as a method to pose critical questions about our relationship with the physical and human landscapes that we are crossing, living, imagining. In this sense, sound – an element frequently subordinated to the visual sphere in art discourses – intersects with digital technologies and with unconventional approaches to listening, thus emerging as a language and autonomous device, which allows us to “feel” and grasp the hidden sides of a territory. From listening – and by extension from the methods and processes based on it – it is possible to access unusual aesthetic spaces, where territories are part of an incessant landscape, of a continuous flow of bodies, voices, ideas, cultures. This is how sound art comes to trace routes along unusual guidelines, acoustic “routes” that open the possibility not only of touring places, but of imagining them and constructing them as complex and reverberant environments.
This ability of sound art is particularly promising when a territory is trapped within a unique narrative, measured until no longer possible through fixed representations (and self-representations), observed through closed gazes, imagined in rare dreams that are proposed as presumptions of reality, until the space for the transformative imagination seems to have already been saturated. In this complex condition, there are many territories in the South of the globe. Among them, there are several landscapes and places of Chile; and among these, there are the spaces of the Magallanic region, whose history has been told many times over many centuries, although many of its “other stories” have not yet been.
In our talk, we suggest the possibility of listening (and weaving) some of these “other stories” from the sound, presenting the work carried out by Chilean artists in various geographies of Chile. On this path, we will find sound narratives that on the one hand open unusual aesthetic spaces and on the other, through a listening point based on “alterity”, tell a story that is not linear, but productively resonant and dissonant.
Along this route, we will also find traces of empathy between Chile and Italy, because even though we arrive from the Northern hemisphere, we also belong to the South: the South of Italy, that is the South of the South of Europe. The mixing of contemporary geographies allows us to go after the experience of a South that is not only geographical but above all ‘epistemological’: an indispensable and repudiated knot of a vast, often economistic world, with its own history of being silenced and resisting, but keeping on communicating from the forces of the territory absent and present, from the interior landscapes, sometimes from the acousmatic, the ephemeral, the strange, the spectral, and always but in any case from the urgent.