Navegando hacia un sur sonoro: Two Sound Stories From South America

The definition of sound art’s remit, domain, or context, which is largely framed within contemporary Sound Studies, involves a series of complex arguments. Its issues transcend those of pure terminology and cross over into paradigms emanating from the cultural, academic, and artistic traditions that generated this label. Several reflections on sound art’s definition have recently been developed within the latter discipline. Certain curators, critics, scholars, and artists have focused on a practice-based, non-Anglocentric, and non-European context.Their debate involves both post/decolonial epistemological issues and the possible access of practices to these issues. In particular, they ask how and why voices and places that exist beyond geo-referenced space – more precisely the Euro-Anglo-West, linked to a tradition of studies, knowledge, and academic research – are excluded. The term arte sonoro as opposed to sound art defines the alterity of the Latin American Southern Hemisphere.

This article is conceptually based on postcolonial/decolonial theory. It analyzes how sonic art practices might enhance enfranchisement strategies by exercising memory, archiving, and addressing history’s resignification. The sound experience, including its sensory, sonic, and affective aspects, is considered a methodological means of interrogating places and histories.

The text presented here focuses specifically on two works developed within this extended context: “Temporal de Santa Rosa” by Brian Mackern, a sound recording and installation project that reinterprets popular, religious, and traditional elements in a post-digital key; and “Antartica 1961-1996”, Alejandra Pérez Núñez’s installation that investigates the imperceptibility of national political processes that have appropriated Antarctic territory in recent decades. The analysis of these two case studies suggests a critical approach to notions such as new geographies, boundaries, and the materiality of sound, as well as proposing possible ways of approaching a sonic dimension of the South. It suggests a journey along unusual listening trajectories through a series of acoustic routes towards a geographically fragmented South, which questions the relevance of a linear story via listening points that allow hidden aspects to be heard and captured.