THE SPIRAL OF FORMICIDAE

Music has been and continues to be one of the ways in which ideological and socio-political projects are narrated and perpetuated. Hymns, slogans and marches inhabit the imaginary of times and generations affected by the heat of the Revolutions. This project utilizes "The Internationale", an emblem of proletarian struggle and one of the most recognized songs of communism, to critically describe the reality from which I come.

Inscribed on a series of broken music boxes, this melody is the harmonic base of my instrument. The mechanical defect prevents the spring force from being stored, causing the harmony to become noise. The anthem is reduced to a portion of information that is fragmented into intonations and sound resources. I use a series of contact microphones to amplify, interpret and decompose the signal of four units. Within the symbolic character of the performance, this loss of the autonomous functioning of each music box means that I must be present controlling the rhythm and cadence of each unit. Slave of a machinery that does not contemplate the wear and tear of the individual, my tired hands make mistakes, which under the listening do not go unnoticed.

“The Internationale” embodies the utopian values and ideals of socialism. From the brokenness, the project uses the symbolic charge associated with this anthem to emphasize the failure of a political and ideological project that has affected the present of my people. Wrapped in the romanticism of building a “New Man”, our lands have seen corruption and totalitarianism grow. The sound and performative gesture becomes a way to subvert reality and produce meaning from unconventional forms, a sound language made of the pieces of a broken system, portrait of a phantom future, the sound of those who grew up watching utopia die.