Unravelling - Unraveling: immersive listening in the synchronicities that interweave migration and conflict
Ximena Alarcón
Colombia - United Kingdom
Unraveling is a sound installation based on recordings of nine Colombian migrant women expressing their own migratory journeys in Spanish and English, as well as responding to fragments of an oral archive with testimonies collected by the organization Mujeres de la Diáspora in 2018.
The installation emerged from Ximena Alarcón's art-research project INTIMAL (2017-2019), and is a collaboration with Oslo-based composer and spatial audio researcher (specializing in ambisonics and wavefield synthesis) Ulf A. S. Holbrook.
In this talk we will reflect on our compositional process and the layers of immersion and emotion that are revealed from our different listening perspectives: one that is deeply immersed in the collective memory triggered by the material, and one that listens from a different culture and language.
We will discuss how the emotional dynamics of detailed breathy voices and footsteps create a territory that connects women's memories across different generations within the Colombian conflict, and explore how Unraveling helps audiences connect to that interstitial territory, which extrapolates to broad contemporary perspectives on conflict and migration.
Finally, we will reflect on the audio technologies used: loudspeakers and headphone listening, and how these open up hybrid possibilities for experiencing emotional telepresence.