In this panel, Eric Namour, Guillermo Santamarina and Gabriel Villalobos will address the traces of ideas, experiences and concepts surrounding the presence of John Cage in music, arts and performativity. The participants will share their thoughts on Cage’s relation to sound and poetics through an exchange of their own elaborations, challenges and relations to sound and music in contemporary art.

Works by John Cage interpreted by Natalia Pérez Turner and Diego Espinosa

Natalia Pérez Turner, solo cello

Études Boreales I-IV (for solo cello) (1978), 20 minutes
Work used for Arcade, a choreography by Merce Cunningham, with stage and costume design by Dove Bradshaw. Cage used the star charts of the Atlas Borealis as a means of composition to organize the duration, intensity, dynamics and tones of the music.

Diego Espinosa, solo percussions

Child of Tree (1975), 8 minutes
This work was originally written for a choreography by Merce Cunningham “Solo (aka Animal Solo/Dance)”. It was one of the dancers in the company, Charles Mouton, who gave Cage a cactus for him to listen to the sound of its spines. This inspired the composer to write a solo work for amplified plants or organic objects. The score consists in instructions to improvise with 10 instruments/plants, chosen with the help of the I Ching and chance operations.

Water Walk (1959), 3 minutes
Work belonging to Cage’s Music-Theater period, originally composed to be performed in the Italian television show “Lascia o Raddoppia”. The score specifies the spatial disposition of various objects related to water (bath tub, ice, blender, etc.) that must be played precisely in sync with a tape prerecorded by the composer.

Eric Namour
Founder and Director of elnicho. Independent producer. He holds a degree in Economic Science and a Master in Cultural Administration of Creative Enterprises. He has curated and produced events and festivals in Italy, England and Mexico, and programmed the festivals Aural (2011-2014) and Radar (2008-2010) in Mexico. His project elnicho aims to broaden the reach of music and sound within contemporary culture, focusing on new and existing audiences and publics through its annual festival and sporadic events. In 2016, elnicho launched a series of four publications on sound in contemporary culture, in collaboration with Buró-Buró and with support from the Sponsorships program of Fundación Jumex and the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC).

Guillermo Santamarina
Art critic, curator and visual artist based on Mexico City. He was Curatorial Coordinator at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2008-2010), and has led several cultural institutions such as Ex Teresa Arte Actual and Museo Experimental El Eco. Since 1981 Santamarina has curated exhibitions for public and private institutions, in Mexico as well as abroad. He is currently professor in Museum Studies and Theory of Art at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City. His texts have been published in various exhibition catalogues. As an artist, his works have been included in numerous exhibitions since 1979.

Gabriel Villalobos
He is currently Curatorial Assistant at Museo Jumex and professor at the Faculty of Architecture at UNAM. He holds a degree in architecture from UNAM and a Master in Design Studies with concentration in Art, Design and the Public Domain from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has worked in institutions including the Harvard Art Museums and LIGA espacio para arquitectura DF. He has participated in international workshops and conferences, and collaborates in specialized publications in Mexico and abroad.

Diego Espinosa
Multi-percussionist, sound artist, composer. Dedicated to broadening the limits of contemporary performance practices through sound exploration. His work and experiments as a soloist, as well as his collaborations, have led him to develop a personal voice that focuses on the importance of the visual component of a composition as much as music.

Natalia Pérez Turner
Cellist. Specialized in contemporary music with an eclectic activity between free improvisation, jazz, contemporary music, rock, as well as constant collaborations with professionals in theater, film, poetry, visual arts, dance and performance. Member of Generación Espontánea, the Trío Filera and the Liminar ensemble.

elnicho
elnicho is an independent organization dedicated to foster the appreciation and dissemination of new and experimental music through concerts, presentations, talks, workshops, a music catalogue and recently the editorial project Libretas, dedicated to sound in arts, in collaboration with Buró-Buró. With its annual festival and sporadic sessions, it aims to promote innovative music, combining and reconciling different genres and contexts in order to broaden the spectrum of contemporary culture through sound.