“Pasochoa” presented by Unda

Sonorities belonging to the indigenous Andean world have been “folklorized,” and so has been done “local geographies” tinted by racialized population suffering poverty and social exclusion. Sound art is a privileged field of critical practices addressed to question persistent racial stereotypes that determine the conditions for subaltern cultural production in An-dean rural contexts. Particularly, the contemporary practice of the soundscapes advances such kind of inquiry by fore-grounding the public dimension of the sonorous event. The Summer of 2017, I produced the soundscape Pasochoa in collaboration with self-taught musician José Sangoquiza, who is an inhabitant of the Pasochoa neighbor located on the outskirts of the inactive volcano of the same name (Pichincha province, Ecuador). My presentation approaches this artistic project to propose that the practice of soundscapes opens ways to oppose the “residual colonialisms of sentience” that, ultimately, have produced contemporary senses of “local culture” and “local nature” in the Andean highlands. I argue that the appropriation of the context of the musical that characterize soundscapes’ procedures, informs a transient mode of listening congruent with the relevance of sentient difference in a situation of globalization.