A journey into emptiness, into the unknown of a knowledge that, because it is known, is forgotten. When the learned becomes commonplace, it disappears, and a new language is constructed to hold ideas. In Tristán Sotomayor‘s “Conjunto Vacío” (“Empty Set”), the primary focus is the body, the way it encounters experience and listening; what is forgotten becomes instinct, ways of inhabiting and traversing the world and its landscapes.

Elements, stories, signs, traces, and references unfold amid pristine, dark, and evocative spaces that challenge and reveal, paraphrasing the musician, artist, and writer David Toop, in sequences where the solid, fixed, stable, and concrete dissolve into the depths of the singular, different, deterritorialized, and immersive.

We witness the construction of a story made up of 7 fragments in which intensities coexist with expansive or contained spaces, traversing moments filled with absorbed information in chiaroscuros that subtly show and hide the place where the sounds originate and coexist.

An invitation to listen to the abstract nature of space, its designs, and structures; the ideas through which one can “float freely in a liquid space of nonlinear time”, as Toop also wrote. It presents an ethereal world translated through aromas, silences, and noises that give meaning in circumstances that constantly change. “Conjunto Vacío” is the sound and image of a story that possesses its own language to narrate the world, its course, and intensity.

Sebastián Herrera
(Santiago, Chile. January 2024)