[ISEA2022] Artist Statement: Patricia Cadavid — Tawa

Artist Statement

June 13th, CCCB Hall, Live Sound Performance, Public Event

Keywords: Sound performance, Decolonial Aesthetics, khipu, Ancestral Andean Technologies, Sound Tangible Interfaces.

The sound performance Tawa_ is an homage to the pre-colonial Andean technologies. In a different experience of tangible live coding and computer music with the Electronic_Khipu_, a sound instrument inspired by Andean Khipus (first textile computers), the interrupted legacy of ancestral practices taken away by colonization is being continued.

“walking toward the future always with the past ahead.”***

In the Andean cosmogony, “Tawa” (four in Quechua) symbolizes two opposite balances that complement each other and reach harmony. Dichotomy and contradiction, stillness, and chaos, that in the year that summed up four (2020) knotted acceptance among uncertainty.

The Andean Khipu is an information processing and transmission technology used since pre-colonial times. This tangible interface is one of the first textile computers known, consisting of a central wool or cotton cord to which other strings are attached with knots of different shapes, colors, and sizes, encrypting different information. The system was widely used until the Spanish colonization, which banned and destroyed many of these devices.

In the performance is played the Electronic_Khipu_an instrument inspired by the traditional Khipus made for the interaction and generation of live experimental sound by weaving knots with conductive rubber cords. Their sounds are embraced with textures reminiscing about the Andes from a prepared charango and immersive rhythms that bring back the present moment.

From a decolonial perspective, Tawa_is an homage to the Andean technologies, continuing the interrupted legacy of this ancestral practice in a different experience of tangible live coding and computer music. The artist takes the place of a contemporary *khipukamayuq* (Khipu knotter), weaving four sound Abstractions that knot the past with the present, creating the balance to face the future.
Tawa is the live performance of the eponymous album released in January 2021 by Vienna-based netlabel Smallforms. https://smallforms.bandcamp.com/album/tawa

***The Quip Nayra (future – past) notion comes from an Aymara aphorism divulged by the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA) refering to the re-actualization of the past as future through the present actions. _Rivera, S. (2015). Sociología de la imagen Miradas ch´ixi desde la historia andina. Tinta Limón.

  • Patricia Cadavid Hinojosa is an immigrant, artist, and researcher born in Colombia. Her work looks at the relationships and effects of coloniality in new media from the migratory experience and decolonial & anti-colonial thinking. She works on the vindication of the memory contained in the ancestral interfaces of the Andes taken away by colonization and their connections with art, science, and technology, reusing them in new artistic processes related to sound, NIMEs, tangible live coding, and multimedia performance. Student at the Interface Culture Lab (Kunstuniversität Linz), she received her BFA from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha and her MA from the Universitat Politècnica de València, multimedia &Visual arts program. Her work has been exhibited in different festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), ADAF (Greece), the NIME and SEAMUS conferences, and several spaces in Chile, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and Colombia.
    https://www.patriciacadavid.net