– What image does the mirror return? 

– Its reflection.

My interest resides on intersections between listening and aesthetical objects, understanding this relationship as a complex field that blurs through their interactions the limits between visual, tactile or sound materialities.

The mental ear, that crucial and intimate instance, tunes us to sharing a resonance with an external agent. By erasing barriers between material or immaterial, listening produces a lens to investigate the sonic asset that resides in disciplines that don´t necessarily include sound: for example, by actively listening to the silence of an artwork (its existence outside the representational field) paths are opened where the vertigo of not knowing generates a unique flow between the presence of the object and our apprehension.

This interest in thinking of the “absence” of sound as a virus that brings to the fore possibilities of perceiving through active listening, makes me think about a “diffractive resonance” perspective. By this term, I mean deploying a sound segment of an underlying flow that is made up entirely of the virtual: the perception of a void that through listening gives rise to the appearance of flows and bifurcations made up of internal memory assemblages that appear through a constant movement between media/objects/subjects. These relatively silent auditory scenes function as a vector of interruption to the representational and syntagmatic relationships that we put in between image and sound, but also emancipate listening from a material conception.

Listening, a transitional act between an arrival point (attention) and a starting point (imagination), reveals this dialectic in a continuous, simultaneous, and (always incomplete) way: the processes of shaking forces between reference and counter-reference give rise to a rarefied sound event. This vertigo promotes an ontological revelation outside of anthropocentrism and directly oriented to an epistemology detriment: aesthetics without representation.

Joaquín Gutiérrez Hadid (b. 1986) is a sound artist working with installation, video and found composition. In 2022, he has collaborated with a commissioned piece for the Argentine Pavilion at Venice Biennale, accompanying Mónica Heller’s exhibition curated by Alejo Ponce de León. He has exhibited works at Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Ruth Benzacar, MACBA (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires), cck (Centro Cultural Kirchner), CCEBA, and performed at MUTEK festival. His previous audio releases are documented on LINE, and/oar, 901editions and Errant Bodies Press. He lives and works in Buenos Aires. Since 2023, he codirects Fundación ORBE.