Festival Art Souterrain
Exhibition place
Activities
Pendulo (2014 to present – in progress)
Fabric hammocks, speaker, accelerometer
Pendulo is a performative sound experience for twelve people at once. Invited to sit in a hammock shaped like a clock, the audience is guided for thirty minutes in a meditation inspired by oscillatory mediations. Originally, these meditations aim to achieve a state of liminal consciousness in which the boundaries between reality and hallucinations fade.
The artist anchors this experience in a reflection on the origins of the cosmos, and the physical and auditory phenomena that result from it. From the noise produced by the chaos of the Big Bang to the fossilized radiation which is its last echo, gravity structures all matter and curves space-time. Using an instrument of his own making, which he plays live, Constantini translates this force into sound to make it resonate through the body. Oscillating above the ground, carried by the gentle swing and a sensation of weightlessness, the audience perceives the sound approaching, moving away, undulating, rising and falling, as if the acoustic space around them obeyed the laws of the universe, being invited to merge with it.
Arcángelo Constantini’s presence and the production of this work were made possible thanks to the valuable collaboration of the Mexican Cultural Institute. We warmly thank Remigio Valdés de Hoyos for his support, as well as Art Souterrain for their commitment.
Biography
Arcángelo Constantini is an artistic inventor and technological hacker whose practice, anchored in an object-oriented ontology, has been questioning scientific and mystical paradigms for 30 years. He hacks into abandoned functional objects to engage in philosophical dialogues and builds experimental artifacts exploring gravitational and electromagnetic processes. Sound is at the heart of his approach, for its symbolic weight and its generative process.
He has worked as conservator of New Media at the Museo Tamayo Arte Greene, and at Espace indépendant 1/4, as well as the 2005 and 2009 editions of the biennial Transitio MX. He was also the curator of the inaugural event of the Fonoteca Nacional and director of Un-cuarto, an independent space dedicated to emerging transdisciplinary art. He is the director of the FACTO festival and currently co-directs the Meditatio Sonus cycle with Marcela Armas. He has received prestigious grants, notably the Rockefeller/MacArthur grant, the production grant for VIDA 11 Fundación Telefónica, the PAPIAM of the CNART and the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (SNCA) – FONCA. S-T-Arts4Watter 2025.
Special thanks to Remigio Valdés de Hoyos of the Mexican Cultural Institute.
