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Sonoro

Thursday 30th July 2026 12:00 - 20:42 BST

Sonoro is a series showcasing Mexican contemporary sound and radio artists. The pieces featured here are albums, collages and multivoice essays that lean towards analogous logics of sound capturing, slow listening, interspecies dialoguing and sonorous contemplation. Curated by Ana Martínez de Buen, these works present almost two decades of soundscapes and sound productions that offer a small sonic window into Mexican radio and sound art.

These recordings originate from a family of string instruments designed to explore various types of chaotic signals, considered as possible sources of sonic languages. The first of these instruments, the Plasmaht Mirror, comprising strings, wood and electromagnetic resonators, operates primarily using signals derived from living plants.

Ariel has called the resulting progressive cascade of harmonic sounds a "harmonic field." Also featured here, the Harmonic Quartz Windows, were designed to elevate these experiments to a level of purity achievable by using fused quartz crystal membranes – rather than wood – as harmonic resonators. The signals employed here originate from thermal noise emitted by silicon crystals. This special edition of these works includes essays written by Ariel Guzik, voiced by Juan Stack, originally recorded for Radio UNAM, and curated for this broadcast by Ana Martínez de Buen.

Recording and sound production – Alejandro Colinas y Emilio Gálvez y Fuentes; instruments design – Ariel Guzik; editorial design and production – María Eugenia Calva; translation – Teresa Carter; photography – Raúl Gonzáles, Gabriel Figueroa, Izzy Seidman; drawings – Ariel Guzik; production – Catalina Juárez Oechler; voice – Juan Stack.

"Sound is a fluid body filling us with our own shape. We are resonance chambers, part of a complex web of affections. In the song of a cricket all the nights of my childhood at my grandmother's house are cyphered, as are the echoes of every organism that has and will inhabit the Earth. This piece is an exercise in re-writing, in recomposition, where I establish new connections, conversations, between some of my sonic essays: from the voice of my maternal grandmother, to my body as a lichen, passing through my interpretation of the No. 8 watercolour in the Athoms series of Hilma af Klint.” – Martha Riva Palacio Obón.

Plexos de sentido (Plexuses of Meaning). 214 questions about writing. First audible and performative session of the node, "Líneas de Fuga de la Escritura: Metáforas de trabajo, Indisciplinas y Plexos de sentido" (Fugue Lines of Writing: Work Metaphors, Indisciplines and Plexuses of Meaning) by Sara Gómez and Otto Cázares in the Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mex), 2025. Script: Sara Gómez and Otto Cázares. Sound design, editing and production: Otto Cázares. Voices: Sara Gómez and Otto Cázares 2025.

Cordiox is a sonorous instrument made from fused quartz glass, taut strings and wood. It explores the reorganisation of signals from chaotic or entropic, thermal and electromagnetic sources using the principles of harmonic resonance. It is a large-scale mechanism that is proposed as an essay on the reversibility of chaos. Recorded at the church of San Lorenzo, 55th Venice Biennale, June 2013.

Instrument design - Ariel Guzik; curatorial project - Itala Schmelz; sound production and sound engineering - Alejandro Colinas y Emilio Gálvez y Fuentes; executive producers - Catalina Juárez Oechler; texts - Karla Jasso and Ariel Guzik; translation - Teresa Carter; technical and electronic production - Leobardo Ramírez; graphic and editorial design - Maru Calva; photographs- Emanuele Basso, Marcela Chao, Laboratorio de Investigación en Resonancia y Expresión de la Naturaleza.

  • Ana Martínez de Buen in Conversation With Cinthya García Leyva

Cinthya García Leyva is a cultural manager and facilitator for creative processes, particularly those around sound. In this interview conducted by Ana Martínez de Buen, they hold an essayistic conversation around the ways noise, sound, scape and voice transcend the idea of the 'present moment', that seems to reign in the act of listening.

Cinthya retakes the concept of ‘constellations’ to exercise an expanded metaphor around what it means to hold and manage artistic spaces – she is the General and Artistic Director of Casa del Lago UNAM, the Artistic Director of Poesía en Voz Alta Festival, and a guest editor and author of the prologue to La materia del sonido (Gris Tormenta). Ana is a writer and an artist who has been working with radio essays for nearly a decade. For both voices in this piece, sound and writing are intrinsically defined by the body, as well as by each other – translation between mediums, languages and disciplines opens a terrain of possibilities and corpo-realities.

A radio opera whose libretto consists of a collection of fables, counter-fables, tales and wise reflections recounted by fictional sages and scholars, recorded in books, poems and prayers that do not exist. The method of composing the libretto was detemined by a machine made of cardboard (the Arca OperÆsópica) to generate thematic groupings and configurations. The performance is carried out by friends and collaborators, none of whom are professional performers. Act 1 consists of ten scenes: The Call, The Apprenticeship, Exercises to Stay Incandescent, Blindness, Exhaustion, Confirmation, The Shipwreck, The Hero, The Adversaries, The Battlefield.

Libretto: Otto Cázares. Sound design, editing and production: Óscar Peralta. Music: Erika Mues Döring, Enrique Arriaga Celis, Otto Cázares. Guest voices: Blanca Guerra, Edison Quintana, Renzo D’Alessandro, Daniel Toca, Angélica Fernández, Gustavo Cázares, Eusebio Bañuelos, Sara Gómez, María Fernanda Rivadeneyra, Antonio Arámburu, Ilán Lieberman, Jessica Wozny, Luciana Corres, Marcela Aguilera, Armando Deverdún, Galo Cázares, Lisi Escobar, Ricardo García-Arteaga, Avelina Correa, Marcelo Schuster, José Manuel Springer, Estela P. Molatore.

  • Earthling Blues by Santi Marín

A selection of unreleased works from by Santi Marin, from the last ten years. "The radio – both as a concept and a tool – is very important in my life and work since I wish to accommodate many different types of sounds, forms and textures into one continuous stream. Earthling Blues is a melancholic celebration of the urban and natural environments of our planet and the impressions they leave on my heart and mind."

A diverse selection of radio productions for different projects: Curiosidad Póstuma. From the series Caprichos Radiofónicos: Analogías, Correspondencias y Similitudes (Radio Whims: Analogies, Correspondences, Similarities’). Script, production and voice: Otto Cázares. Broadcast by Opus 94 (Mex) 2024. Bombas de tiempo artísticas. From the series Conspiraciones: Bitácora de un admirador de Balzac (Conspiracies: Logbook of an admirer of Balzac). Script and voice: Otto Cázares. Production: Francisco Ángeles. Broadcast by Radio UNAM (Mex) 2014. Crescendo absoluto. From the series Cuaderno de los Espíritus y de las Pinturas (Notebook of Spirits and Paintings). Script and voice: Otto Cázares. Production: Iván Primitivo González. Broadcast by Radio UNAM (Mex) 2012.

Campanas, campanas, campanas. From the series Caprichos Radiofónicos: Analogías, Semejanzas y Correspondencias (Radio Whims: Analogies, Similarities, and Correspondences’). Script, production and voice: Otto Cázares. Broadcasted by Opus 94 (Mex) 2025.
Viaje interestelar. From the series Conspiraciones: Bitácora de un admirador de Balzac (Conspiracies: Logbook of an admirer of Balzac). Script and voice: Otto Cázares. Voice of the taxi driver: Juan Mejía. Production: Francisco Ángeles. Broadcast by Radio UNAM (Mex) 2014.
Dar peso a mi propio corazón. From the series Conspiraciones: Bitácora de un admirador de Balzac (Conspiracies: Logbook of an admirer of Balzac). Script and voice: Otto Cázares. Guest voices: Juan Mejía, José Manuel Springer, Ada Santibañez. Production: Francisco Ángeles. Broadcast by Radio UNAM (Mex) 2014.

  • Acts of Listening: Restoring Time’s Murmur by Erika Arroyo Guerrero

Memory is a reconstruction traversed by fissures, deviations and fabrications. To remember is always to piece together a puzzle of disparate elements, a dialogue between imagination and trace. This sonic exercise explores tenuity, the weight of presence and absence, erasures and rewritings, that which persists in the material support of the recording. In inherited and/or found archives, the voice that might bring us closer to the lived experience is almost never present. Faced with that void, listening with support and beyond it opens the door to possibility. The intention is to activate plasticity, to open the senses and dispose, all of them, to another kind of listening. It is an effort to dig out the family album or the box where shared memories lie, to let their fragile materiality speak, making audible the very process of remembering as a living, shifting representation.

Ballena Gris/Grey Whale is a collection of ten sonorous experiments created in the Laboratorio de Investigación en Resonancia y Expresión de la Naturaleza (Laboratory of Research for Resonance and Nature’s Expression). Other than the tenor sax in the fourth track, no traditional instrument, sound processor or synthesiser were used in the making of this piece – all the recordings of soundscape (birds, cetaceans, echoes and atmospheric sounds) are original, some made underwater, others inside the laboratory's vaults, and others made under the sea in the middle of the bay through submarine microphones. Recorded at Magdalena Bay 2002 and at San Ignacio 2003, Baja California, México.

Credits: Instrument design, experiments, sax, drawings and texts - Ariel Guzik. Sound, mixing and editing - Emilio Gálvez y Fuentes; recording - Alejandro Colinas; executive producer and precursor for the expedition - Alejandra Frausto; technical and electronic production - Leobardo Ramírez; photography - Gabriel Figueroa and Raúl González; submarine filming - Peter Schalkwijk; film and microphotography on land - Raúl González; design - Alejandro Magallanes; master - Kurt Upper; field logistics - Alejandra Frausto, Tim Means, Emilio Gálvez and Fuentes, Leobardo Ramírez and Peter Schalkwijk; building the acoustic submarine transmitter - Peter Schalkwijk; translation - Adriana Díaz Enciso; production assistance - Ibeth Castañeda, Carmen Terán; Recording and post-production by Laboratorio Plasmaht and La Legión V.

Sonoro
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20:42
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