João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga travels to DRC for sonic mapping project

Johannesburg >> Kinshasa and Brazzaville

João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga is a Peruvian Italian Brooklyn-born Johannesburg based artist, composer and maker of physical and virtual “things” that play with reality by deconstructing it, shifting expectations of standard uses or purposes of objects and processes.

Through experimentation and improvisation João explores the connective capacities of sound through its physical properties and material preconscious properties, seeking a balance between computer technology, hand-made electronics and real world sounds like the human voice, field recordings and traditional musical instruments.

João explains the concept of his experimental sonic mapping project in the DRC:

I want to make audio recordings of the areas on both sides of the Congo River in the
urban areas of Kinshasa and Brazzaville. The trip would entail a combination of walking pre-planned routes, unplanned routes and important and unimportant locations using in-ear binaural microphones, which mimic realistic human hearing. I would be gathering and assembling an archive of sound that could start to build a sonic footprint of each city, with particular attention to, but not limited to, the areas near the river.

Back in Johannesburg, I would work with the audio recordings towards an
aestheticised investigation into the rhythms and textures of the two cities. The aim is not to make direct or explicit comparisons, but to examine the materialities and the captured information (rhythms, textures, etc) in an exploratory way, shifting from a “real” representation towards an audio version of a set of maps or graphs depicting different aspects of urban life through analysis, deconstruction and reconstruction. The results would be presented as a multi-channel sound installation and as two sets of recordings. Any comparison between the cities would be left to the listener.

Follow João’s sonic mapping journey on Instagram.