alejandro valencia

_{Canciones Orbitales: Cymbaline, compressed soil object, Redlands, Florida}

“The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return.”

– Carl Sagan, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean

canciones orbitales explores notions of displacement, migration, and alienation, focusing on the importance of communication to transcend physical, and ideological boundaries. The project takes the form of a series of site-specific, performative installations in key sites of the South Florida landscape: the shores of Miami Beach/Key West, the Redlands in Homestead, and the ecosystem of the Everglades.

These sites’ symbolic and historic qualities, and their relationship to migration are activated by small cymbal-shaped objects or “probes” made with materials that reference each location. Through a succession of performative actions, a musician plays an improvised arrangement of words in Morse code in Spanish, English, or Créole. Words that denote connection such as “somos, us, nous, we, me, yo, tú, nosotros“, become rhythmic patterns and signals to be carried by an aircraft, boat, or wildlife as they travel through their path in the sky or the ocean. The instruments used in the performances are an essential element to the activations, as the instruments are created to be played in pairs, with one male and one female counterpart.

A Colombian gaita or kuisi, a djembé, and maracas are played on each specific site, close to the cymbal-shaped object. The instruments become satellites or antennas of communication, a local transmitter to a remote receiver, sending signals that bridge two distant places in time and space.

canciones orbitales will take place during the 2023 AIM BIENNIAL in Miami, throughout December. The AIM BIENNIAL is a conceptual program organized by Marie Vickles, william cordova, Gene Moreno, and Amy Rosenblum-Martin, promoting outdoor ephemeral, virtual, and physical art projects by cultural practitioners based and affiliated with the state of Florida.