OSWALDO MACIÁ – EL CRUCE

By John O’Hern
February 28, 2024

The Ashlyn Perry Studio Terrace at the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary overlooks the railyard in Santa Fe, a place of comings and goings. It opens directly off the Dee Ann McIntyre in Memory of Scotty McIntyre Artist Studio where Columbian artist Oswaldo Maciá was the first artist-in-residence.

The inaugural year of the artist-in-residence program is funded by a generous grant from the Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation.

The terrace is the site of Maciá’s sound sculpture, El Cruce, which fills the space with sounds of migratory bats, insects, New Mexico desert winds and the rhythms of the txalaparta, a percussion instrument played in the Basque Country of northern Spain—all punctuated by the sounds of the railyard. The eight speakers suspended from the ceiling create an enveloping environment of sound.

When we experience 3-dimensional sculpture, we experience the material object itself as well as the space around it. We can move in that space and observe the sculpture from many viewpoints. In Maciá’s sound sculptures, there is no visual object. He eschews what he refers to as “ocularcentric” art, saying, “My sculpture fills space with volumes of sound and smell. El Cruce is a sculptural composition formed of sound that still operates as sculpture. Sculpture is about the relationships people have to the space and volumes that form the world. I’m utilizing a wider perceptual range, which opens itself to subjectivity over objectivity, experience over knowledge.”

In his “Manifesto for Olefactory-Acoustic Sculpture,” he states “As humans, we like to think we know. The expression ‘I know’ is comfortable to say. Not knowing is uncomfortable. Not knowing is the beginning of a useful problem.

“I create questions that cannot be dispatched, or rendered pointless, with an ‘I know.’ This is an expression that kills questions; it is the antithesis of creativity or progress….

“The distinction between noise and sound is entirely dependent on knowledge. Often the noises in my acoustic compositions are animal calls. Those who study bioacoustics might recognise them, and know them as sounds.

“The elements of my sculptures create scenarios where perception tests the limit of knowledge.”

El Cruce, the “cross” or “crossing” comes from the Latin crux, crucis, which means “an instrument of torture”. By the 15th century, cross referred to the juncture of two intersecting lines as in arms of the original device. Today, it continues to refer to intersections but also to transitions (“crossing over”, “crossing borders”) and, in the case of sculpture, “crossing the limits of perception”. Maciá refers to the migration of the Spanish and colonists to Santa Fe and the migration of artists drawn by the desert and its extraordinary light. He refers, as well, to present day migrants crossing through Central America to our southern border.

“To reflect on this concept of the crossing from an acoustic point of view,” he says, “I focused on the sounds of migratory bats.”

Bats emit calls from about 12 kHz (kilohertz) to 60 kHz, most of which are far beyond the human hearing range of 20 hz to 20 khz. He and his collaborators used ultrasound recorders to collect the calls.

A Basque musical instrument may seem to be an anomaly in a composition created especially for a site in New Mexico. However, the device itself is another example of crossing, crossing over from a tool to a musical instrument. In the Basque region, at the end of the cider pressing process, a plank or two are removed from the press used to crush the apples. The planks are dried and then set up on two baskets or trestles.

Maciá relates that they are played by two players who hold wood dowels dropping them rhythmically onto the planks, holding a conversation as they play what has become the txalaparta. They employ rhythmic combinations and changes of tone, intensity and tempo. “The planks are used to announce that the cider making process is done,” he explains. “And then they are used to celebrate it. It migrated from being a tool into an instrument—so, in some way, crossing. The two musicians listen to each other and have a dialogue.” The unique percussive sound calling people to a celebration recalls the wooden han in Buddhist monasteries which is also struck rhythmically with a wooden mallet. The unique sound can travel over great distance to call people to meditation in the temple.

Once he has gathered the sounds gathered specifically for a composition or from a vast library of sounds, he retreats to the studio to compose the work—“to try to balance all these volumes in the space as well as silence which is also important. There is silence as well as high points and low points,” he relates.

Talking about space and our senses, Maciá refers to the scientific observations of people from the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius to Barry C. Smith, the British philosopher and director of the Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study at University of London, as well as co-director of its Centre for the Study of the Senses.

Lucretius wrote in his six-book poem, De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”), that nature consists of 2 principles: “The atoms and void are the only things that exist in reality.” For Lucretius the void was just that—a completely empty space in which no particles exist.

Maciá revels in that void, but sees it occupied with molecules of smell and waves of sound. Many of his sculptures involve both sounds and scent. In his 2021 installation, New Cartographies of Smell Migration for the Kunsthalle, Berlin, and later shown at SITE Santa Fe, he created large scale maps to “expand the perception of global connections through the sense of smell, engendered through trade, winds and insects.” The maps were accompanied by recorded sounds of desert winds and rainforest insects as well as the scent of tree resin from Peru and styrax gum from Honduras.

On one of the maps, hung outside the studio at Vladem Contemporary is a drawing of the tropical euglossine bee. On another is a drawing of Ophrys apifera, the bee orchid. Fascinated by the symbiotic relation of the bee and the orchid, Maciá worked with his perfumer associate to extract the scent of the flower, take it into the jungle to attract the bee and record its sound to add to his aural library. Male euglossine bees visit the orchids, attracted by the strong scent of their nectar. This trick not only attracts the bees to pick up pollen and transmit it to another flower of the same species causing cross-pollination, it also causes them to pick up the scent which they later use in their courting displays.

Maciá remarks on his fascination “about the intelligence of the orchid that seduces the pollinator to perform the service it needs. This is an example of how we are all interconnected.”

As he encourages our uses of senses other than vision to experience forms of art, he comments on Aristotle’s presentation of five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, each of which Aristotle said operates independently of the others. Maciá refers to Barry C. Smith who writes about neuroscientists’ having determined that the 5 senses do interact and that there are actually between 22 and 33 total senses—the sense of balance, for instance, or kinesthesia, the sense of the movement of our limbs. “The senses are all equal and important”, he says.

His research into neuroscience led him to a recent biography of the Spanish scientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for his research into the functioning of the brain. He produced extraordinarily beautiful drawings of nerves and the gaps between neurons in the brain that are called synapses. The gap, unlike the void between atoms that Lucretius described, is the location of the transmission of signals from one neuron to another.

After World War I, Cajal wrote that the war had chilled his enthusiasm for investigation. Maciá relates that Cajal had low expectations for the future of humanity, that the cells of the brain had not evolved from the “’foul instincts’ of beasts”, that the horrors of war would be forgotten and subsequent wars would be inevitable.

He asks, “How can artists talk about this world? It’s a complex question. You know, you have to have complex work. We are part of a collective choir, a collective voice of thinkers who, from the philosophical point of view, are articulating something more coherent in terms of policies that are more humane in some way, that will improve the quality of life for everyone. Artists can’t make change. We can influence those who have the power to make change. Writers, theater players, dance companies, other artists are part of the choir, an army of people shouting. It’s more than a voice coming from the choir. It’s a force of energy.

“The members of the choir sing their own parts without, necessarily, a proposed result. Like the bees that may fly to thousands of flowers and produce only a spoonful of honey, they contribute by pollinating the flowers, they pollinate the plants that produce fruit later. We may not know what kind of fruit will be produced later but we still contribute to the choir. We don’t do it to get a pat on the back of congratulations, we do what we can because we believe we can improve humanity. Already, the younger generation is more conscious of their environment and the our interrelationships.”

As for his own compositions he says, “there is a lot of work to do regarding expanding the language of sculpture and the senses in more immersive work. My work is like a seed that grows inside a person. People read a book and an idea rests in the back of their head until they read something else that makes a connection to it. When they experience El Cruce and later experience another sound work, they make a connection. They hear the work and if they put attention to it, they can move from just hearing into listening. When you listen, things can change.”