Carolina Caycedo
Matadero, Madrid
The past spring, Carolina Caycedo (London, United Kingdom, 1978) was invited to collaborate with Intermediae, one of the institutions devoted to contemporary creation launched in 2007 by the Madrid municipality, in a project based on the concepts of sound and neighborhood. The artist of Colombian origin completed a sound map that reflected her tours of the Madrid neighborhood of Legazpi, one of the districts with the largest multiracial populations in the Spanish capital, which as a result of this variety produces a myriad sounds, both in terms of music and of the different accents contained in the Spanish language. The field work, together with the observation of the geographic and thematic contexts, determined part of the personality of this project, titled La Stargate. Under the slogan Me suena raro!( It sounds weird!), the artist organized a series of events with a clear bidirectional orientation, in which passers-by were invited to share their experiences and, at the same time, to view some of the works that Caycedo had produced in cities like Bogotá, Kassel or Fortaleza.
The experience thus began by identifying points of departure in the streets of Legazpi, and it left to chance the tracing of the eventual itinerary to record the sound landscapes that constitute that area. A collection of sounds which, through the sense of hearing alone, lends a face to the neighborhood‘s everyday situations and to its people, while proposing, at the same time, something extremely complicated: the tracing of something that is not physycal. This difficulty is the origin of the installation with which this project culminates: one of the exhibition halls of the Mataderos Cultural Center hosts geometric-shaped landmarks showing the places where these sounds have been recorded, offering the spectator and the listener the possibility to crystallize and materialize their geography on the basis of the sound experience emanating from each polyhedron.
