Agüero&Arenero /Omen&Sandbox
Mauricio Valdés San Emeterio and Miguel Mesa
September- November 2015

The projects Omen and Sandbox are developed through research, recopilation of materials and programming. Agüero, uses as its prime material some aspects of people’s belief, while Arenero focuses on work related to improvisation and sonorous intuition.

Arenero is a project that experiments with sounds developed with improvisatons  and recording of sound-scapes of the Historical Downtown. At the same time, it is an app and central tool in the process of the work, that also includes a series of workshops open to general public regardless of their musical education. It proposses improvisation as a formative element centered on the value of the sonorous gesture, intuitive or casual, as the only vehicle of expresion and prima mater of the working sessions.

Agüero investigates ritual, objectual and vocal manifestations of belief related to superstitions, blessings and curses, either at the social, grupal or personal level. One of its key questions is: what is the relationship between people, objects, places and words that are considered to be magical?

Mauricio Valdés San Emeterio

Composer and sound artist living in Slovenia since 2010, his work mixes both, guided and free improvisation, acoustic composition supported by new media and the development of techniques of composition based on genetic sonification. His work as artist and teacher is characterized by technological content and use of new forms of propagation of sound, like directional speakers and software development. His catalog includes over 40 works in different formats.

Miguel Mesa

His artistic work is developed under 3 main lines: “self knowledge” (works that show inaccessible shades of ourselves and exercises that he calls “Ecology of History”), “self criticism” (works that question our ways of understanding and responding to our natural, civic and social surroundings), and “aesthetic or formal questioning” (works that confront the supports and approximations towards them). His work has a large participatory /dialogic component. The result translates into scenic projects, concerts, and exhibitions at galleries, festival, museums and public interventions that have been presented in Latin America, Europe and the USA.