Building the Bass
Vibration is a way of knowing that travels through bodies before becoming language. In the universe of sound systems, bass reorganizes breathing, alters perception, and turns the body into technology. It is within the body that frequency becomes experience, technique, and memory. From this embodied dimension of sound, the activity is conceived as a guided listening session that proposes a journey through sonic landscapes from the Caribbean to the Brazilian Amazon. Each piece of music will be presented as an archive, not only as a sound recording but as a trace of techniques, cultural displacements, and collective inventiveness.
The circulation of these musics allows us to observe how frequencies travel, are translated, technically adapted, and reinvented in new contexts. The aim is to understand how vibration produces spatiality, presence, and forms of knowledge built through experimentation: testing, calibrating, repeating, adjusting. A knowledge that materializes in shared practices through gathering, celebration, and dance.
Beyond the stories that will be shared, speaker boxes also narrate. They tell of processes of handmade construction, experimentation at the limits of the ear and the chest, and technological appropriation and transformation. They point to another way of inhabiting modernity by revealing practices of reconfiguration, use, and reinvention of sound technologies. In this listening experience, the museum becomes a resonance chamber, where the audience takes part in an experience in which perceiving is also knowing.
Natalia Figueredo is an architect, urbanist, and cultural theorist. She graduated in Architecture and Urbanism at Escola da Cidade in São Paulo (Brazil) and completed a master's degree in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). She is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, where she researches urbanism in the Amazonian territory. She is also a member of the Observatory of Anthropology of Urban Conflict (OACU) and collaborates with the European project Sonic Street Technologies, researching sound technology in the urban Amazon. Her main areas of interest include informal urbanism, popular culture, political ecology, decolonial studies, and feminisms.
