Ashnola’s Granular Ice (2021) is a sound composition based on photographs used as scores. The work attempts to interpret images of complex soundwaves present in an ice layer into a sound  piece.  

Initially, inspired by Ashnola’s valley landscape. I entered this valley under two conceptual  frameworks. First, the Andean worldview that experiences Nature as an entity with subjectivity  that expresses itself through sound. And the second one was, Grounded Normativity, an idea  put forward  by scholars, Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that proposes a relation to the land based on respect and reciprocity. So, in order to get familiar with the place, I started a series of walks in attempt  to have an embodied experience of the natural landscape and sounds. In other words, I approached listening as a process of the body, trying to enter the spacewith a non-extractive gaze. As I walked  through the Ashnola River's shore, I observed a layer of ice that formed due to the low temperatures of the Canadian Fall season.  

Consequently, I created a series of photographs based on these ice layers. The images resembled  soundwaves, so I perceived them as a natural sound score of frozen frequencies. Therefore, I  recorded with a contact mic several ice sounds that were later used for the creation of a composition  with a granular synthesizer. The idea of dissolving the sound of frozen frequencies into grains attempted to access different temporalities of the river. The piece attunes to Indigenous auditory logics related to the natural world and proposes a flexible listening practice that responds to the layer’s intersections of my position as a Mestizx listener from the global south.

ESTEBAN PÉREZ (b. 1992 in Quito, Ecuador) graduated from Emily Carr University of Arts +  Design with an MFA degree in 2021. His work has been part of exhibitions such as: ‘Radical  Reworlding’ (AHVA Gallery UBC, 2021), ‘Triplete’ (No Lugar, 2018), and Premio Brasil (Centro  de Arte Contemporáneo, 2017), and in 2019 he had his first solo show Transitory (Más Arte, 2019).  In 2020, he was the recipient of The Audain Travel Award in Vancouver. In the same year, he won  the 2nd Place Award in RAW, an MFA online exhibition, organized by the University of Montana,  USA. He was selected for the Premio Brasil –Arte Emergente (CAC), an award funded by the Brazilian embassy in Quito for the promotion of Emerging Artists. In 2021 he has been an artist in residence at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and at the Similkameen Studio Residency  organized by Griffin Arts Projects. 

Check out his website.

Listen to the accompanying sounds for these images on Soundcloud.

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