Arciniegas / Frith / Garcia

Sentipensantes Experiments

Elisa Arciniegas, a Colombian musician, composer, improviser and producer, is launching a research project linked to a series of musical encounters exploring improvisation as a method of composition, at the crossroads of physical gesture, intuition and social action to sculpt sound.

Inspired by SENTIPENSAMIENTO — a word originating in Afro-Colombian communities and taken up by Colombian sociologist and activist Orlando Fals Borda — the research is based on an approach where emotion, intuition, rationality and physicality intertwine in a creative and collaborative dynamic. It also engages with the phenomenology of French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gaston Bachelard, as well as the hybrid cultures of Argentine sociologist Nestor Garcia Canclini, to conceive of composition as a living act, traversed by cultural confluences — reflecting artistic tensions, adaptations and resistances in the face of stereotypical identities.

This research also focuses on the work of Fred Frith, the iconic English guitarist, improviser and composer, and on the work of the Lyon-based collective ARFI (Association à la recherche d’un folklore imaginaire). These are two transcendent journeys in independent musical creation, which question and cross the boundaries between theory and practice, popularity and erudition, intuition and structure.