Baquema is a collaborative project in which a group of four cross-disciplinary artists are exploring creative connections between electronic music, sound poetry, nature, and the body.
The performance version of Baquema involves multi-located actions in three different settings that are connected and put in contrast during the streaming:
First setting: a prairie. The many resonant layers of small animals and plants blown by the wind on a prairie. At night, crackling fire sounds.
Second setting: a living room turned into an improvised stage with coloured lights for a performer dressed in black and white. Searching gestures, movements and freezing.
Third setting: a virtual one, in which electronic termites feed on human voices, and live coding disassembles the original audiovisual piece. A colourful sonic composition is re-created and awaits milliseconds to be streamed.
The artists collaborating in the project currently live in these three distant spaces. As a common seed to start linking the three environments, they chose an op-art painting by the British artist Bridget Riley, Blaze 1, whose patterns and spiralling movements inspired the music, the performative gestures, and the shapes of the objects made with pliable plant materials.
The electronic music composition is made using Sonic Pi. During the performance, different synthesizers and sample triggers are modified pseudo-randomly using live coding.
Baquema explores an aesthetic in which nature’s diverse interactions and digital scattered processes become intertwined.
How can we cross, navigate, engage collectively in an evocative journey during these strange times? Through music, sound art, land art and performance, the Colombian collective of artists, Cuatrimoto, seeks to creatively shape scenarios to experience nature, the body, aurality and synesthesia. During the 2020 global pandemic and in times where biodiversity is threatened on a planetary scale, they are exploring how to relate to telematics as a way to connect individuals and communities in an extended perceptual realm.
‘Cuatrimoto’ is the Spanish word for ‘quad bike’. As artists, we imagined a vehicle capable of navigating through tangible and non-tangible spaces, crossing the rocky, muddy, luminous, dark, aerial and liquid of the virtual and non-virtual experiences. Two musicians and sound artists, Juan Hernández and Diego Herrera, a visual artist, Alexandra Ordóñez, and a performer and sound artist, Ángela Hoyos Gómez are part of this collective. All four belong to the larger network CRaTil@, working with participatory music and sound arts since 2017.