Ximena Alarcón
http://soundingunderground.org
Ximena Alarcón is a UK based Colombian artist who focuses on listening to social context related sound, connecting it to individual and collective memories. She nourishes her practice with ethnography, looks for expression in voice and body, and uses networking technologies as resources to interconnect different locations and perspectives of life. Underground public transport systems have been the context of her recent work. They determine the paths for, and are catalysts of, real and symbolic migrations. They change both our perception of space and time and our memory in relation to place.
In her last project, commuters in London, Mexico and Paris linked their personal history with their journeys, while these overlapped with political and social circumstances in each city. Physical and metaphorical undergrounds from these cities are now connected via Sounding Underground, an Internet-based Interactive Sonic Environment, where any visitor can have the listening experience of unique sound features in each city and overlap locations based on sonic links. http://soundingunderground.org
Ximena completed a PhD in Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University in 2007, and she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship 2007-2009 to develop the practice-led research “Linking Urban Soundscapes via commuters’ memoriesâ€. Currently she works as a Research Fellow in the Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at the same University.