Sound art is increasingly, in the last few years, the center of the interest of artists, curators and scholars, and it is an innovative field of experimentation, study and research within the territories of contemporary art.
It has been recognized as a discipline and a category generated by a series of knowledge models related to the cultural tradition of Western Europe and of the anglosphere. Sound art is today an environment in which emerge a series of practices that insist on ‘other’ geographic, aesthetic and cultural coordinates.
In this moving and expanding field, it’s highlighted the work carried out in Chile by the research group that revolves around the Tsonami festival in Valparaíso, in which is applied and shared the work developed by artists who experiment methods and processes in which sound intersects with digital technologies and with unconventional approaches to listening.
This paper focuses specifically on a couple of works developed by Chilean artists: an installation and recording project developed in 2012 by Fernando Godoy in the desert of Atacama and “Antartica 1961-1996” an interactive audiovisual installation by Alejandra Perez Nuñez.
The analysis of these two case studies implies a critical commitment with notions such as “new” geographies, borders, the practice of mapping, the materiality of sound, as well as a proposal for a possible approach to the sound of the South. These two works invite us to embark on a journey built along unusual guidelines, in a sound deriving towards a geographic South crushed in a series of acoustic ‘routes’ that question the meaning of a linear story, interrogated through patches of listening that allow “to hear it” and capture its hidden sides.