Paola Torres Núñez del Prado: The Sonic Waraca
As part of the digital component of Gathering, the Textile Museum partnered with the collective Mending the Museum. Paola Torres Núñez del Prado was one of six artists invited to interpret pieces from the Textile Museum’s collection.
Paola created a sound piece in response to Peruvian textiles from the collection. Learn more about the Mending the Museum project here. Click on the link below to listen to Paola’s piece.
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, The Sonic Waraca (2023), Audio
The Sonic Waraca is a textile controller that refers to a rather forgotten aspect of textile technologies, and that is weapon development (military/war). The waraca has gained a renewed relevance these days as these have been used by Andean inhabitants to defend themselves against the abuses of the current Peruvian government when protesting for their rights. This Waraca works as part of a quadraphonic sound system, and it shifts the sound among the speakers depending on where it is positioned, while also modifying sounds that come from the protests themselves.
-Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (PE/SE) explores the boundaries and connections in between tactility, the visual and audio related to the human voice, to nature, and to synthetic ones whose listening is often considered less harmonious, such as machine or digital noises. Her work is essentially complex: she explores the limits of the senses, examining the concepts of interpretation, translation and misrepresentation, so as to reflect on mediated sensorial experiences while questioning the cultural hegemony within the history of Technology and the Arts.
