Sounds Like is an audio series from Infrasonica, a digital platform dedicated to non-Western sonic arts and cultures. For Sounds Like, we invited three artists from our network of collaborators to respond with a sound piece to our three editorial lines to date: Sonic Realism, Audible Matter, and Voicing Abstraction.

Mercedes is a visual and performance artist from Buenos Aires who calls Amsterdam home. Her practice aims to dismantle rigid historical narratives, creating space for dissident voices to emerge, often with an aim of addressing the vulnerable and collective body from a non-colonial, feminist perspective. Her work draws inspiration from Latin American fiction, pop culture and new materialism theory. For Sounds Like, we asked Mercedes to create a sound piece responding to Voicing Abstraction, Infrasonica’s third editorial line, which explores the potentialities inherent in the poetics of spoken language, asking: is it possible to name a shapeless thing? Mercedes responded with her piece “Seized atelier”. This piece carries something of the quotidian. It brings to mind the work of the Uruguayan author Mario Levrero. At times it feels as if we’ve been dropped into a recording device and lost behind the sofa, bearing sonic witness to the mundanity of daily life, of motherhood. A quiet, cheerful voice. The crinkling of plastic wrap, ice clinking in a glass. At other times, otherworldly sounds haunt the piece, the breathy, sinister gasping of something veering towards the monstrous. What are we to make of this collection of sounds? How can we begin to interpret them? Should we even try or should we simply settle into them?


To get into these questions and more, we’re also joined by Infrasonica’s Editor in Chief, Pablo José Ramírez in the second set of episodes of the audio show Sounds Like.

→ Listen to Sounds Like | Mercedes Azpilicueta | Episode 4