Sound Design and Musical Composition for Camila Rodríguez Triana’s exhibition within the framework of the Rolex artistic exhibition for Mentors and Protégés Arts Initiative in September 2022 at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music).
Text by Camila Rodríguez Triana:
“In 2019 I began research on the ancestral culture of the Andean territory. Territory from which my paternal ancestral lineage descends. My great-grandfather was part of an indigenous community that inhabited the Andean territory. During the war in Colombia, he had to move to the city and suffered from miscegenation. As the years passed, all ancestral knowledge was lost: we forgot our ancestral language, our customs and beliefs and we lost our names and surnames. We began to identify ourselves as mestizo.
My artistic work has developed as a constant search for this ancestral inheritance that I did not receive and as a search for that mestizo identity.
Awareness of origin changes the idea of identity as something individual for the conception of being connected to others, to those who existed before and who created the conditions of my birth. In this new idea of identity in which the individual is broken, there is the awareness that the history and wisdom of the ancestors live in one’s own being. Thus my ancestral orphanhood is healed and by recognizing my ancestors I can begin to build my own identity.
In each of my works, sound is fundamental. I am interested in the relationship that is created between visual work and sound. For me the sound adds a new dimension to the work. I relate the image to the rational part of the human being and the sound to the emotional part. I believe that the image first communicates with our rational part: the image seeks to be deciphered and understood before letting it touch our emotions. Sound, on the other hand, communicates first with our emotions; It quickly takes us to sensations, memories, longings, and then we try to understand why we feel one way or another. With sound I explore the creation of environments, songs, sound spaces that combine sounds of nature, ancestral instruments with digital instruments. Through sound I seek to contribute to my works the sound space, the environment or context in which they inhabit; I seek to transport the viewer to that imaginary space that coexists between the ancestral and the contemporary, between nature and the civilization where my work lives.”
KAY PACHA
Installation. Tree trunks, green and yellow yarn, old door, old clothes, buttons, light, sound. Dimensions: 700X700X200 cm. 2022.
“The Kay Pacha, Cay Pacha (Quechua), or Aka Pacha (Aimara) is the name given by the Andean culture to the material world in which humans live throughout their lives accompanied by mediating deities. This world begins at birth and ends at death and its characteristics are patience and strength. The Andean culture inherited the cosmogony of the Inca people. In this work, the artist makes an exercise of re-appropriation of this vision of the human world. In this proposal, the artist uses thread (delicacy and patience) and wood (strength) as the main materials. The artist builds four nests from which we hear four mothers singing with their young children. The songs are in ancestral languages. These songs are accompanied by an environment created from the sounds of nature. In the center of the installation, there is a wooden door intervened by the artist with dry branches and threads. A door that promises us an arrival, but also a departure. The door and the nests are located in the middle of trees that the artist reconstructed by joining dry branches and trunks that she found on the ground in parks. With thread, the artist built the sensation of the leaves.”
Camila Rodríguez Triana
Song composed by Roberta Ainstein
Singers Siem Kool, Margarita Gulian, Radana Kas, Nia Alexandria Watson, Heron Myth Watson, Yarrow Lenape Watson, Roberta Ainstein, Helena Guerrero, Camila Rodríguez Triana.
Sound mix Diego Voloschin
INTUITIVE LANGUAGE EXERCISES
Series of 5 songs in aiff and mp3 format (To listen with headphones)
“In collaboration with sound artist Roberta Ainstein, Camila Rodríguez Triana composes and sings five songs. Each song is inspired by an element of nature: water, air, earth, fire, metal. The lyrics to these songs are written through an intuitive exercise in language creation; an attempt to remember a forgotten ancestral language. The artist wanted to find the feeling of the song in the sound, rather than understanding the meaning of the words.”