Malamemoria V

In 2021, I was granted a residency at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Chile, where I worked with sound archives from the Pinochet dictatorship era. The material was extremely sensitive and charged with human and political meaning, which made the act of working musically with it both difficult and revealing. I composed a piece from a single archival sound: a series of recorded postcards sent by a family in exile to their relatives in Chile, at a time when there was no instant communication. In the recording, the parents can be heard playing with their baby, Ricardo, using musical toys so they could later send these sounds by courier.

What struck me was the coexistence of multiple forms of memory within that sound: the technological recording, the emotional intention of the parents, and the child who would later grow up with no conscious memory of that moment. The composition was made imagining Ricardo as an adult, listening to the recording of himself as a baby and attempting to remember not through the archive, but through his own memory. For this reason, the piece begins with clarity and gradually dissolves, as memory fragments and loses coherence.

This experience became a turning point for me. It raised questions I am still unable to resolve about sound, memory, time, and meaning, and it strongly shaped my inclination to approach sound as a trigger for knowledge rather than as material alone.

Notes

This project was published under my pseudonym, Visopardo.

I met incredible people during the three-month residency, including Nicolas Jaar, Atom TM, Matías Aguayo, F600, Alusiva, René Roco, Manfred Werder, Angele, Sebastián, José, Paulina, Mr Mots, Arturo Ses, Alberto Bone, Cristian Reinas, Camila Toro, La Palomera, Juan Pablo, Felipe Sáez, Seba, Jony Flordefuego, and Agnosia.