What techniques, ideas, or artists have been particularly influential in shaping your work?
Many artists and composers have been fundamental to my development. Daphne Oram is an important reference because of the way she understood sound as inscription and her ability to imagine relationships between drawing, matter, and electronic synthesis. Her work has helped me think about magnetic tape not only as a technological medium, but also as a form of writing the invisible.
Pauline Oliveros and her practice of Deep Listening have also profoundly influenced me, particularly through the understanding of listening as a form of attention, awareness, and collective relationship. Maggie Payne has been influential in terms of recording, spatial perception, and her microscopic attention to sound. In Laurie Spiegel’s work, I am drawn to her ability to construct imaginary sonic worlds through electronic systems, while in Beatriz Ferreyra’s music, I find a deeply sensitive approach to movement, sonic matter, and spatialisation.
The genealogies of Latin American women composers and artists have also been essential to me. Figures such as Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, and Mexican artist Leslie García have opened paths between electronic experimentation, the body, technology, and situated forms of thought.
I also deeply appreciate the compositions and legacy of Mexican composer Antonio Russek. His extensive work in electroacoustic music, experimental composition, and sound art has been fundamental to the development of electronic music in Mexico. I am especially inspired by the rigour of his research, his attention to timbre and spatiality, and his lifelong commitment to expanding the possibilities of listening and sonic creation. His work represents an essential point of reference for understanding the history of electroacoustic experimentation in Mexico.
I am equally influenced by contemporary artists and close collaborators in Mexico, including Mexican violinist and sound artist Gibrana Cervantes and Mexico City-based vocalist, composer, and sound artist Camille Mandoki. Through improvisation, extended instrumental and vocal techniques, and collective composition, their practices have expanded my understanding of listening as a space of trust, dialogue, and shared creation. Working alongside them in the ensemble Amor Muere has shown me how collective practice can become both an artistic methodology and a form of mutual support among women working in experimental music.
Rather than following a single tradition, I am interested in building bridges between these historical and contemporary genealogies, my own experience as a Latin American woman, and my relationship with analogue and digital technologies.
This year’s Conflux theme is “Tactics for Cultural Resistance.” How does this idea resonate with your own practice? Are there particular tactics of resistance that you find meaningful or necessary today?
Today, we need to resist multiple systems of oppression: political violence, the loss of historical memory, the commodification of life, extractivism, cultural homogenisation, and technologies designed to capture and fragment our attention.
Within this context, I believe listening can become a tactic of resistance. To listen attentively means to slow down, recognise the existence of others, and perceive what has been silenced or excluded from dominant narratives. In my practice, sound allows me to approach memories, territories, and histories that may not have been preserved within official archives. Magnetic tape therefore becomes both a surface of inscription and a metaphor for memory: something fragile that can be erased, rewritten, or reactivated.
There is something profoundly political and beautiful about gathering together to listen to a concert or a sonic composition. Collective listening connects and moves us at a time when many systems seek to produce isolation, disconnection, and the erosion of communal bonds. Gathering, paying attention, and allowing an experience to affect us may seem like simple gestures, but today they can become meaningful forms of cultural resistance.
From an audience perspective, what kind of experience are you genuinely trying to create? Is there something you would like people to notice, feel, or take away from your performance?
Attention and presence are fundamental to the experience I try to create. I do not want to impose a single interpretation or direct the audience towards one particular emotion. Instead, I am interested in constructing a space in which each person can relate to sound through their own memory, sensitivity, and imagination.
Sound has an extraordinary evocative power. It can affect us physically, touch memories we did not know we carried, and produce sensations that are difficult to explain through language. Low frequencies can be felt throughout the body, while other vibrations may generate tension, fragility, or a sense of intimacy. I find this relationship between vibration and the body direct, intimate, and honest.
I would like the audience to enter a state of attentive listening, perceive the transformations of the sonic material, and allow themselves to be affected by them. Perhaps they might also recognise that listening is not a passive experience: it involves openness, attention, and establishing a temporal relationship with what is unfolding.
