Near and Remote Memory Activation Practices, w/ Tatiana Heuman

 

Near and Remote Activation Practices (2021-2025) is a live performance by experimental instrumentalists Ale Hop (Peru) and Tatiana Heuman (Argentina). Inspired by South American sound technologies and organology, the artists have created clay instruments—such as bottle whistles, flutes, rattles, and trumpets—which they combine with electronic synthesis techniques. It premiered in Amsterdam at Sonic Acts Academy 2022 as a live performance that combined spoken word with sound created by the instruments. It is currently featured at the exhibition “Feel the Sound” at the Barbican Centre as an installation where visitors can interact with the ceramic pieces.

 

Interactive pieces, "Feel the Sound", at Barbican Centre

 

The artists draw inspiration from South American sound technologies, such as whistling bottles and whistles—crafted by Indigenous cultures over millennia and still in practice today. Their work reimagines sound synthesis, moving beyond conventional signal processing that underpins electronic music to approach it as a material process. By engaging with the elemental forces that shape these ceramic instruments—such as the interaction of wind, water, and fire with sedimentary rock—they modulate new sonorities, later enhanced through electronic modulation and amplification to create hybrid synthesis technologies.

Cárdenas and Heuman reclaim clay as technology and these instruments as vessels of transmission and relation. Challenging Western music ethnography, they disrupt the framing of these artifacts as static, “traditional,” or pre-Hispanic, instead presenting them as living, evolving entities.

As the backbone of the research, they use two comprehensive organological studies, the seminal book from Carlos Vega, “Los instrumentos musicales aborígenes y criollos de la Argentina”, and the Peruvian study from Cesar Bolaños, “Mapa de los instrumentos musicales de uso popular en el Peru.”

 

 

Live Performance, “Keroxen”, at Tenerife

 

INSTRUMENT CATALOG