Sound Artist Residencies

2024
Unravelling (Ximena Alarcón & Ulf A.S. Holbrook)

"Valle de Cocora" in Colombia. The palm is Colombia's national tree called "Palma de Cera del Quindío". Photo credit: Ron Herrema.

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Unravelling (Ximena Alarcón & Ulf A.S. Holbrook)

After a thorough shortlisting process, we are delighted to announce we have awarded our Immersive Audio Network: Sound Artist Residency to Ximena Alarcón, a Sonic Migrations Artist, working in collaboration with Oslo-based composer and spatial audio researcher Ulf A. S. Holbrook.

The sound artist residency will fund their sound work: Unravelling. It is based on recordings of eight different Colombian migrant women expressing their own migratory journeys in Spanish and English, as well as responding to fragments of an oral archive with testimonies collected by the organisation Diaspora Women in 2018.

The sound work is a reflection on their multilayered responses and synchronicities that weave a fragmented history of migration and conflict. This sound work will exist both as a sound installation, and as a concert piece, allowing for different modes of presentation.

Ximena and Ulf will explore how people could experience the installation involving responses to the listener's body in movement, either with an array of speakers or also considering headphone listening and experimenting with Head-Tracking for Audio, integrating it with Ximena's Intimal App. 

The finished work will be toured as an installation at Centro de la Memoria Histórica in Colombia, performances at art spaces such as Iklektik and Cafe Oto in London, Dareshack in Bristol, a resident talk at The Studio in Bath as well as festivals and conferences internationally.