Artivist Sonorities: Liminal Listening in Ibero-American Experimental Music and Sound Arts

This book explores the multifaceted and heterogeneous field of experimental music and sound arts in the contemporary Ibero-American context. To this end, the study is structured around the notion of sound artivism as a plural space of creative—critical and situated—practices that bind the aesthetic dimension closely to the social, the political, and the epistemic. Throughout these pages, the artistic work of numerous creators and collectives from Spain and Latin America is explored, in which sound and listening function as forms of knowledge, resistance, and protest.

 The artistic practices analyzed in this volume allow us to think of sound experimentation a form of exploration—an open and unfinished practice that rejects the normative models of academic music, institutional art, and the standardized listening habits of mass-produced music. From this perspective, the idea of liminal listening is proposed, in which what matters is not so much sound as an object but rather listening as an aesthetic and political act in its own right. Listening, after all, is always an enactive phenomenon, not a passive event. Liminal listening, then, entails a situated attentiveness to what usually goes unnoticed—to what lies on the margins, in the echoes and edges of perception.