Elena Vargas

Mexico, resident 2022

Elena Vargas was born in Mexico City on March 8, 1994. She is an emerging interdisciplinary artist with a special interest in vocal research, audiovisual language and sound performance. Her creative search tends to generate tools and methodologies that link people with listening, acousmatic meditation and the deconstruction of sound. She is a graduate of the National School of Theater Art (2018).She has collaborated on projects with artists such as: Angelica Lidell, Indira Pensado, Nohemí Espinosa, Jesusa Rodríguez, Rosario Armenta, Marianella Villa, Barbara Lazara, Roxana Elvridge among others. She develops as a vocal performer, teacher and writer; She currently resides in Mexico and conducts research with sound spectra.

Echo ephemereal

Elena is an actress, and in the last years of her career she began to dedicate herself to sound art. During her residence she developed a series of sound performances that had, as central point of investigation, the understanding of what happens with her voice when she resonates with the space. Her research is part of a triad composed of: sound, body and space and how they are related.

During the month in Ruido Blanco, she made recordings of the trips they made with the residents to get to know spaces and places outside the tourist circuit and enter the local territory. These recordings also act as a travel diary, they are a record of the hours they were together in Iguazú - meals, conversations, and everyday sounds of the house.

Elena presented a table with 5 sound files at the Open Studio:

1. A Guarani song, from a ceremony they attended.
2. Trans and Zion go through different stadiums.
3. Poems read by them.
4. A fiction product of the visit to the house of fictional Horacio Quiroga.
5. White noise.

In addition, she performed two ephemeral performances, where she covered her body with ñau mud. Elena's art can appear violent at times, often unreservedly feminist and often crude. On this occasion, she incorporated natural elements such as water and mud, searching for the limit in her own body, which acted as a sounding board for sounds that sometimes seemed animal and other times human, of pain and pleasure, of happiness and of sadness.

Text: Irene Gelfman