Tsonami International Sound Art Festival seeks submissions from artists, theoreticians, researchers, architects or anyone interested in general, to develop research projects in the city of Valparaiso, Chile.
Considering the local and global contingency of urban spaces in changing processes, Valparaiso presents itself as a city where symbolism is the main field of battle towards the establishment of a “development model” for the city.
Declared as Unesco World Heritage in 2003, it is considered as the “cultural capital of Chile”, being now the subject of endless speculation about the model capable of releasing it from a long state of decay and neglect. The city appears, then, as a niche for symbolic and urban speculation, gen- erating processes of gentrification on various levels. Continually, port, creative and touristic development models are being discussed, almost always in favor of private interests over public ones.
From this context, we question the role that sonic imagination can play in the future of urban space: Which consequences can have the consideration or the omission of the city’s acoustic energies in models that try to project and think over it, leaving the abandoned audible as a residual aspect of the urban condition? Would it be possible to think about the city starting from the sounds that it should produce? Is it possible to measure the quality of a community life from its acoustic space? Which validity do the ideas of design and acoustic ecology have in the contemporary city? Which is the implication that urban transformation’s phenomena have for the social hear? How do these processes of urban transformation sound?
Beginning from here and many other possible questions, we seek the development of projects that use sound imagination, either projected positively – as pragmatic utopia – or from a field investigation in the territory, in order to propose – speculate from the sound in relation with the city.
http://www.tsonami.cl/2015/opencall2015.pdf