Specialising and Exhibiting

Week5-Sound Arts Lecture Series

Lena Ortega Atristain is a sound artist, researcher, designer, and teacher with a Ph.D. in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her doctoral studies focused on contemporary art that works with nature/natural phenomena as a medium. she approaches these constructions from the concept of atmosphere and the embodied experience of nature. She have specialized in nature/culture relations in practice-based research for more than a decade.

Her focus is on sound environment ecology, bioacoustics, and field recordings. Her aim to cultivate the community’s ecological consciousness by involving listening practices, field observation, recording, and composition. Her main focus is the bird population/individuals of nearby surroundings and how they relate to and are part of their territory. she approaches these inquiries by incorporating other dimensions of care and relationship with non-human animals and the environment that open possibilities to think critically about the spaces we inhabit and how we are environmental beings.

This collaborative project is a digital drift that explores different relationships with the environment, nature, humans and non-humans from the formulation of an intersubjective body. Its main search is to generate resonances with and among the others. In these complicated times in which it seems that our existence unfolds in front of the screen, confined to the space of the black mirror, it becomes urgent to challenge the limits and scopes of digital life. We need to rethink the way in which we inhabit the others as well as our own subjectivity. Tercer Cuerpo Sonoro (Third Sonorous Body) seeks to open up possibilities to experiment different ways of being of the body through telematic means in order to simultaneously find ourselves in other physical, sonorous and emotional places. This work proposes approaches between people and entities, which are not able to happen physically, but that can occur through exercises of reinterpretation and intervention of places and bodies. The idea is to exchange and reappropriate places and sounds to generate third sonorous bodies around the world and resonate with others, especially at a distance. 

I enjoyed the sense of space in this piece. The natural sounds such as water, stones and footsteps from field recordings brought me walking around mentally. I also enjoyed how well the way voices mixed with the ambient music, it was very beautiful.

I found her way of making sound pieces was very performative: I still remembered how she wanted us to stream on the screens. It was very creative to gather the listeners, otherwise, the screen would be really cold.