Sonic Darts # Rare Earths by Guely Morató Loredo

Gwaith Swn's Sonic Darts is a London-based sound art collective presenting new sound works, performances and discussions.

This episode delves into the visceral intersection of sound art, performance, and extractive politics with Bolivian artist and researcher Guely Morató Loredo, director of the Sonandes.org platform. Her latest work, Rare Earths, takes the form of a performative dinner where guests are invited to gather around an edible landscape that evokes the actual extraction in the Andean Altiplano and the Lithium Triangle (Bolivia, Chile, Argentina).

Using transducers embedded in the table to transmit infrasound and a multichannel soundscape composed of field recordings from the territory, Guely Morató transforms the act of eating into a ritual of confrontation. The work not only documents resource exploitation but seeks to re-tune the participants' bodies to the invisible forces and cycles of sacrifice of the land, making the abstract violence of global supply chains tactile, audible, and tasteable. Guely Morató's trajectory, anchored in the direction of Sonandes since 2014, underpins this exploration of deep listening as a political act.

For Morato, listening is a form of resistance against the logic of acceleration and individualism by demanding unhurried attention—an embodied stance that cultivates empathy with the "other," whether that is a person, a community, or the territory itself. In this conversation, we explore how Rare Earths functions as an open score that can be reimagined in other contexts of ecological sacrifice, utilizing the gathering around the table as a rare space where hierarchies soften and solidarity can emerge from the simple, radical act of sitting down, eating, and truly hearing one another.