MAURICIO. Midnight reflections on our own Northern Ventriloquist's skills.

[Campo Amniótico begins]

An Audio Article by Mauricio Carrasco and Fernando Garnero in dialogue with YouTube links by Thirusha Naidu, Achille Mbembe and Rosi Braidotti.

FERNANDO. We met at the turn of the millennium at the Geneva Conservatory, and soon after we started collaborating in what constitutes by now a solid body of work. By then, none of the intersectional taxonomies related to gender, race, or geographical origin were taken into account by the musical institutions we attended, or by society in general.

MAURICIO. During the nineties, during our bachelor studies in South America, it seemed that the only way for us to achieve something and leave our repressive societies behind was to migrate to Europe.

FERNANDO. There was an almost axiomatic belief circulating in our environment at that time: to settle in Europe—at least for a few years—was the only way to acquire a ‘real’ compositional technique, to obtain a ‘real’ experience of composition. You had to ‘be there’, ‘soak in’, ‘breathe that air’.

MAURICIO. The rather unquestioned path consisted of coming to a European country where the conservatory was not too expensive, especially without a scholarship, where one could survive doing student jobs or some teaching while getting the classical music education from the first hand, the original source.

FERNANDO. How could we know by then that we were going to be cursed to play a Southern role? Who could have foreseen this mirror movement, this symmetry? Our character carried performative mandates that were the opposite of those of the colonised South we had left behind. We rebelled against both in a symmetrical movement, sometimes retroactively.

The first thing I knew when I was born was exile: well, what an idea to be born in Argentina in 1976, child of a left-wing militant couple. That was the year of the coup d'état, in which the bloodiest dictatorship in our history began.

Having been born on the periphery, the only possible milestone left for us to be part of the ‘real’ musical universe was to emigrate.

MAURICIO. We grew up attending conservatories that had this admirative look towards Europe, which shaped the musical education we received in Chile or Argentina from an early age.

THIRUSHA NAIDU. “Northern Ventriloquism is a term that I created to describe when Global South researchers appropriate northern ideas and repurpose them for their own purposes, where they will speak northern ideas on systems and structures and values and ways of seeing the world to the north” (Naidu 2021).

MAURICIO. I remember that as a bachelor student, any visitor who landed in a pretty locked up country as was Chile in the nineties, was received as a huge event. For instance, I remember how exciting it was to see Ensemble Modern performing at the Goethe Institute in Santiago some years after the end of dictatorship. To see such effervescence—crowded, enthusiastic young audiences. I remember the ensemble musicians seemed surprised by such a reception. Of course, now, living in the Global North, and a few decades later, the presence of a major new music ensemble is quite common in festivals and venues, and I experience it more like something on the order of a normal event.

FERNANDO. I spent months searching in libraries, consulting with contemporary music geeks in Buenos Aires, asking those who had the chance to travel to help me get the scores of two works that I came to know almost by chance, and which had a profound impact on me. Gerard Grisey’s 1986 work Talea was one of them.

Grisey was a reference to a spectral movement that existed for more than twenty years, but that was practically unknown in Argentina. The second was by another fundamental composer, and also inaccessible for us by then: Lo spazio inverso (1985) by Salvatore Sciarrino. As both were published by Ricordi, I went to their office in Buenos Aires. I remember the astonished faces of the employees when asked for the Sciarrino score—people who were used to selling mainly solfeggio methods or musical instruments. Finally, a somewhat more avid manager told me that the simplest way to obtain them would be to go directly to Milan.

THIRUSHA NAIDU. “And you start to speak in this northern voice” (Naidu 2021).

FERNANDO. When I began to write a diary about my stay at the French Academy in Rome, a recurring starting question was: in which language should I write it?

MAURICIO. The foreign language is not English (or any other language for that matter), but the language of the Global North: the language of civilisation, the language of progress. The one that colonisers’ history manuals exalted as a main instrument of transmission of the superior legacy offered to the colonised, namely their culture.

FERNANDO. Xenos, the stranger, the foreigner, was the signifier around which was possible to build an ‘I’.

MAURICIO. Curiously enough, as a student, I had to learn a classical guitar’s repertoire largely constituted by original works written by Latin American composers. Lots of those having a folkloric root.

Walter Mignolo starts his article on epistemic disobedience like a fairy tale: “And once upon a time scholars assumed that if you ‘come’ from Latin America you have to ‘talk about’ Latin America; that in such case you have to be a token of your culture” (Mignolo 2009, 160).

FERNANDO. What would epistemic disobedience mean for someone who creates music and knowledge about making music? Wouldn't the re-appropriation of the folk music tradition be another sign of obedience? Wouldn't it embody what the North sees or thinks about someone from the South? As an Argentinean composer, should I recreate tango over and over again? If tango is already a product of the encounter between Central European folk and African rhythms, is the South American component agogic then? A form of pronouncing?

MAURICIO. We met as students in a European higher musical institution.

Mignolo points out that “institutions are created to accomplish two functions: training of new (epistemically obedient) members, and controlling who enters and what knowledge-making is allowed, disavowed, devalued, or celebrated” (176).

I remember I had sort of two versions of the works I played: the one for my professor, with the phrasing she wanted, and which I played within the institution’s examinations, and the more personal one, the version I would play in concerts and competitions outside the conservatory.

Perhaps one way to escape—both the performative obligations imposed by my guitar professor and a repertoire I disliked, characterised greatly by original works imbued with the colours and rhythms of Spain or its former colonies, to which the guitar lent itself so easily with its rasgueados and tonalities that I still avoid today—was to undertake an exploration of different expressive, technical, and aesthetic alternatives to the classical guitar, which I experienced as an asphyxiating milieu.

NARRATOR. “Tell me the thing that you desire and I can provide it for you” (Koltès and Wainwright 2001).

[ Campo Amniótico fades out. Interlude fades in.]

FERNANDO. That’s how we started collaborating first as students, and then by creating the Vortex ensemble.

For instance, let's look at the Interlude for Electric Guitar I composed for you in 2014.

NARRATOR. In this interlude, the guitarist holds objects in both hands: a sponge and a slide on the left, a ruler on the right. The tablature specifies: the rhythm, the areas where the objects need to be placed, the placement of the objects in a specific spot on the guitar, which determines the pitch, the direction in which the objects will move, indicated by arrows, the level of pressure of the objects over the strings, indicated by rectangles: white for light pressure, black and white for medium, and black for hard pressure, the control of the wah pedal indicated by a circle for ON and a cross for OFF.

ACHILLE MBEMBE. “All the tools, machines, technological artifacts, and devices with which humans interact, serve to fulfil two key functions, either to replace human action or to respond to human expression or sensation” (Mbembe 2019).

NARRATOR. The repetition of elements has little to do with a minimalistic intention, but with an obsessive, constant repetition of a short pattern that has an obstacle in front of it that prevents it from going further.

Once the obstacle is overcome, there may be a doubt about continuing, manifested by seemingly lengthy fermate. Like a toy running out of batteries, those become longer and longer by the end of the Interlude. The last fermata, the longest of the Interlude (eleven seconds pause), succeeds the last loop of the work, a seven-times-repeated 2/4 bar of a rising gesture in diminuendo produced by gradually closing the wah pedal. A fragile last gesture in pianissimo finishes the work.

ACHILLE MBEMBE. “That is, technology as instrumentum, a means to an end, and technology as an anthropology, that is, simply, as an activity performed by humans, an activity that sets humans apart from other species” (Mbembe 2019).

NARRATOR. Musical instruments reflect on this double essence mentioned by Mbembe, they serve to convey human expression, and they have historically evolved together with societal technological evolution. In this respect, electric guitar has played a major role in the passage to a mass reproduction and accessibility of music through the 20th century, contributing to, as Jacques Attali (1985) points out, enable music to be fully integrated into the global political order.

MAURICIO. However, in new music, we are far from feeling integrated into a global political order. At the most, we modestly try to comment on our contemporaneity from a peripheric point of view.

[ Interlude fades out. Neon Pig fades in.]

FERNANDO. The "technique" to produce music and the language to talk about it is learned in the North.

I regularly use electric guitar in chamber settings: an example of that is Neon Pig, a work premiered at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music BIFEM by the Argonaut Ensemble conducted by Elena Schwartz in 2017.

MAURICIO. I was an Artistic Associate to the festival, and our main interest with artistic director David Chisholm was to render accessible to Australasian audiences works that were otherwise far from their radar. Although Australia doesn’t officially make up part of the Global South, together with New Zealand, they have faced their own postcolonial challenges. BIFEM started as a festival in response to a programming policy that was always repeating the same names, those of the composers supported by a big publishing house. It was either that or the alternative scene—which Melbourne is a great place for—but it was logistically complicated to program, commission, and present more ambitious works, such as Neon Pig .

FERNANDO. So, in Interlude and in Neon Pig, we are in a different mindset than in Campo Amniótico, this audio article opening and closing work. Finally, we use the language of the North to discover whether we have our own purposes in the South. We are left to imitate, to mimic, but also to re-situate a place that can never really exist, to situate something impossible.

This impossible is the only universal to which a being from the Global South can aspire in this world ruled by the North.

[ Neon Pig fades out. Campo Amniótico fades in.]

The lack, the absence, the desire, is the only place from where we can do our northern ventriloquisms.

ROSI BRAIDOTTI. “Oxford University has set up a few years ago a massive institute run by Nick Bostrom. It is called—and I’m glad you’re sitting down—'The Institute for the Future of Humanity’. The ethos of the institute is Transhumanism. Transhumanism is human enhancement, human enhancement through brain implants or rather interfaces between brains, computational systems, clinical psychology, philosophy of mind. Millions in subsidies, incredible postdocs and PhDs, so get in there. Artists are very welcome, so long as you have your maths and physics under control” (Braidotti 2015).

NARRATOR. Campo Amniótico distances itself greatly from transhuman influenced music works that showcase this human enhancement, a sort of new brilliant instrumental virtuosity that demonstrates the technical prowess not only of the performer but also of the technological cyborg elements that reinforce them and allow the human to surpass them. Instead, Campo Amniótico questions the sacralisation of the musical instruments and of the symbolic support that is the music score: composers and performers are left to the arbitrariness of the medium they must inhabit through feedback, and where synthetic voices remind them from time to time of what Bruce Nauman had in mind as early as 1985 in his work Good Boy, Bad Boy, not as a jouissance of our own demise, but rather as a reminder that...

Bruce Nauman
Good Boy, Bad Boy (1985-86)

The highlighted passages correspond to the parts where the voices are clearly audible throughout the audio article.

I was a good boy
You were a good boy
We were good boys
That was good

I was a good girl
You were a good girl
We were good girls
That was good

I was a bad boy
You were a bad boy
We were bad boys
That was bad

I was a bad girl
You were a bad girl
We were bad girls
That was bad

I am a virtuous man
You are a virtuous man
We are virtuous men
This is virtue

I am a virtuous woman
You are a virtuous woman
We are virtuous women
This is virtue

I am an evil man
You are an evil man
We are evil men
This is evil

I am an evil woman
You are an evil woman
We are evil women
This is evil

I’m alive
You’re alive We’re alive
This is living

I live the good life
You live the good life
We live the good life
This is the good life

I have work
You have work
We have work
This is work

I play
You play
We play
This is play

I’m having fun
You’re having fun
We’re having fun
This is fun

I’m bored
You’re bored
We’re bored
This is boredom

I’m boring
You’re boring
We’re boring
This is boring

I have sex
You have sex
We have sex
This is sex

I love
You love
We love
This is love

I hate
You hate
We hate
This is hating

I like to eat
You like to eat
We like to eat
This is eating

I like to drink
You like to drink
We like to drink
This is drinking

I like to shit
You like to shit
We like to shit
This is shitting

I piss
You piss
We piss
This is piss

I like to sleep
You like to sleep
We like to sleep
Sleep well

I pay
You pay
We pay
This is payment

I don’t want to die
You don’t want to die
We don’t want to die
This is fear of death.