SELECTED WORKS
2024
On repetition to encounter change ~
Sound performance commissioned by MOVE! Krefeld
Krefeld, Germany. October 2024.
Altar for the Inner Cenote
sound piece Commissioned by Kunstmuseum Bochum. Bochum, Germany 2023 -2024.
Part of Irene Fernández Arcas’s work ‘Hygeia’s Cave – Collective Regeneration Temple.’ .
The starting point for the sound piece was understanding water as a body with memory, agency, and knowledge, prompting contemplation of how our connection with water shapes our relationship with the world.
Dandelion Listening SessionsMixtape / Listening session
Colomboscope / A Thausend Channels – Episode Five Sri Lanka – Berlin, Germany. 2024
The mixtape is the outcome of a series of listening sessions held with Dandelions across Berlin, specifically in the neighborhoods of Neukölln and Kreuzberg during the summer of 2022. Throughout these sessions, a collection of texts, sounds, and emotions emerged, resonating in live performances and culminating in this mixtape. Afro-diasporic rhythms and elements of popular music are interwoven, serving as an invitation to ancestral spirits to join the space of listening and exchange crafted during these encounters.
In the midst of thinking of the process of ruination around the society we live in, the need to pause and attentively listen to the resilient, persistent and courageous nature of this plant within concrete jungles came to life.
May your sonic journey throughout the Dandelions universe be an invitation to tune in to the murmurs to the plants within and around.
MURMUR
Sound Sculpture / Live performance
Commission for the Brücke Museum / Part of the Expressionism Revisited symposium.
2023 Berlin, Germany.
MURMUR encourages the experience of a living archive, rewinding and listening back to counter narratives. Sonic sculptures were built up from the garden of the Brücke-Museum, moving towards the inside of the building. It poses the following questions: How can we listen to knowledge outside of the modern imperial narratives? And, in the process, how can we make the canon of modern and classical art more porous? How do we shift from the panoramic and universal perspective of modern art and move towards a practice of embracing a plurality of worlds listening to each other? In the task of re-envisioning and questioning what we understand as modern and classical art, listening and embodying through music, rhythm, and echos becomes a practice that opens gates to embark on this endeavor.
Rite of Passage
Sound Sculpture / Publication
Master´s Thesis Raumstrategien – Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin
2023 Berlin, Germany.
"Amuleto Manuela MA Thesis presentation on Rites of Passage was a carefully assembled sound offering blending family episodes within a larger historical thread, stretching multiple temporalities, continents and culture heritages yet to be discovered by the artist herself. The process of letting the unspoken emerge, made its appearance through the dusty scratched sound of the records. As a smoky voice glitching memories and resisting their codification, but also translating the weight of their bodies into the rivers of knowledge meeting that day. To work with music as an architecture of encounters pushes the public into a sensorial experience, where the setting and rhythms moves us from within. It was very interesting to witness how this compositional act based on intuition blurred the academic frame it was hosted by, challenging evaluation parameters and our own body language inside it." - Paz Ponce
Rite of Passage
Mixtape/ Research
2022 Berlin, Germany.
¿How to afford the time for mourning in a society that imposes and demands productivity? ¿how to grieve when one is physically far away?
Rite of passage is my way of taking the time, doing it and honoring it. Not only the grief of dear people to me but also the mourning of many.
Honoring the time for transitions, in a global scale it is a time of mourning of a society that is killing itself and that is on a constant process of ruination; a society that needs to be radically transformed.
Offering to the Schäfersee
Sound Sculpture
New Year’s Concert and Art Interventions at Schäfersee, Berlin on 07.01.2023. Curated by Citizen Art days and sponsored by the Projektfonds Urbane Praxis.
2023 Berlin, Germany.
The Schäfersee is a lake in Berlin created 10,000 years ago by a block of ice left behind when an Ice Age glacier melted. Since some years it’s been contaminated by residual waters from the city and as a result of that its suffering serious ecological problems. Because of the heavy metals and suspended matter it has been receiving and its actual situación the lake is considered biologically dead. The sound offering was a call and invocation to other ways of relating to water.
Sonic Circle
Sound Sculpture / Sound Installation / Live performance
A commission for Transition Exhibition in Kunsthaus Dahlem – Brücke Museum.
2021 & 2022 Berlin, Germany.
On layers of sounds of ‘rites of passage’, testimonies can be listened to. The testimonies reunite an array of voices that open up the context, function and ongoing life of the works of the collection. Amuleto Manuela’s Sonic Circle is inspired by the Circle of Words practiced by the Wiwa among other Colombian indigenous communities, in which the people sit together around the fire to listen to each other. It is a ritual of sharing in which feelings, ideas, reflections and stories circulate.
The Sonic Circle follows this model of encounter, proposing to emphasize the communality of the space through a practice of remembering and listening. The ‘Rites of passage’ is a composition by Isabel Martinez de Guzman, from the community of San Onofre, Sucre in Colombia. It is a song of wake and farewell that offers to the works of the collection the transit into another state. Thus, the Sonic Circle intends to offer a passage, and welcome the works within some of the knowledge that was erased by the violence of colonization. By juxtaposing and focalizing testimonies from different subjects, the Sonic Circle seeks to open up a space for a “deep listening” and socialize ways of perceiving the collection as living beings with further connections -belonging to places, people and practices-, as well as part of the on-going contested space in which colonial collections are questioned.
The testimonies have been compiled by Anna Brus as part of the Brücke Museum initiative towards a critical index and beginning of provenance research of the collection.
Audio Guide to Latin American streets 2019 -2020.
Sound Sculpture / Sound Installation
A commission for el Museo de la Democracia at the ngbk Berlin (neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst e.V.).
2021 Berlin, Germany.
The audio piece called Audio Guide to Latin American streets 2019 -2020 consists of material that deals with the sound dimension of protests in the streets of Latin America (Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Brasil, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru) between 2019 and 2020. It compiles anonymous donations of audio material collected in the winter of 2020. It was a commission for el Museo de la Democracia at the ngbk Berlin (neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst e.V.).
Sonic Passage
Sound Sculptures
Within the Invocations For The Phoenix To Find Its Form In Us. On Restitution, Rehabilitation and Reparation.
SAVVY Contemporary
2021 Berlin, Germany.
Sonic offerings along the three days of Invocations at SAVVY Contemporary touching the topics of Restitution, Reparation, and Rehabilitation from her diasporic/Colombian perspective. Popular music in vinyl, field recordings and elsewhere soundscapes inhabited savvy’s space. The will of active and critical listening, to ourselves and the places we come from, through non-imposed, decentralized perspective, was the driving force of the sonic sessions.
Water DJ Set
Lecture Performance
Listening Biennial at Errant Sound.
2021 Berlin, Germany.