small forms

PATRICIA CADAVID

TAWA

…”walking toward the future always with the past ahead”.

In the Andean cosmogony “Tawa” (four) symbolizes the two opposite balances that complement each other and reach harmony. Dichotomy and contradiction, stillness and chaos that in the year that summed up four, knotted the acceptance among the uncertainty.

The Andean Khipu is an ancient textile computer used in the Inca empire for the processing and transmission of information encrypted in knots and cords of wool. This system was widely used until the Spanish colonization that prohibited and destroyed much of the existing Khipus.

This sound composition encoded in the knots of a contemporary Electronic_Khipu_ converted to a MIDI controller, is embraced with textures that reminisce about the Andes from a prepared charango and immersive rhythms that bring back the present moment.

Four sound Abstractions knot the past with the present, creating the balance to face the future.

Recorded and composed in Valencia – Spain (December 2020)

Patricia Cadavid Is an immigrant, artist, and researcher, born in Colombia. In her work, she looks at the relationships and effects of coloniality in new media from the migratory experience and decolonial & anticolonial thinking. She is currently working on the vindication of the memory contained in the ancestral interfaces of the Andes that have been taken away by colonization, reusing them in new artistic processes related to video, sound, tangible live coding, and multimedia performance.