Spiral is an act of expanded listening—a sonic invocation that calls forth living memories, breathing territories, and technologies that continue to speak. It is not merely a shape or symbol, but a way of thinking in motion: a continuous flow, a folding of time upon itself.
Inspired by the spiral symbol of the Quimbaya-Kumba peoples of present-day Colombia—where it represents thought as a non-linear, continuous movement—this piece proposes a form of composition without center or fixed destination. It resonates with Aymara wisdom, which suggests walking toward the future with eyes on the past.
The work is built around two sound instruments inspired by ancestral Andean technologies:
Electronic_Khipu_: A sound interface made of conductive rubber cords, inspired by the Andean khipus—ancient tools of memory and coding. Here, it becomes an instrument of improvisation, gesture, and energy.
Kanchay_Yupana//: A rhythmic sequencer reinterpreting the yupana, a pre-Columbian calculation tool. Its logic is intuitive, cyclical, and open to improvisation—neither binary nor linear.
These instruments are not played like machines but activated as living bodies—extensions of territory, breath, and gesture. They do not follow a score; they breathe, listen, and respond.
The sonic materials—birdsong, Andean rain, wind, cicadas—do not illustrate but inhabit. They are presences that evoke the unsaid, the non-human, the enduring. Each vibration opens a crack in linear time, inviting other ways of sensing and remembering.
Visually, Spiral is accompanied by an aesthetic inspired by cyanotype: deep blue-toned images evoking light, shadow, water, and suspended time. Throughout the video, footage of rivers, earth, palo santo smoke, and wind intertwines with linear compositions of the instruments in action—like moving drawings. The piece culminates in the rainy Andes mountains, closing the cycle with a return to the land.
Spiral does not represent a cosmology—it embodies one. It is an act of re-existence, a way of composing through intuition, the body, and memory, where the ancestral is not past but a living force breathing in the present.
