Issue # 12 Constanza Alarcón Tennen

Curated by: Carla Lucini

Variaciones de un Antisecreto - Resistance: Decoding historical artifacts.

Costanza Alarcón Tennen’s work has often focused on sound, particularly on the sublime sounds made by natural phenomena and the symbolisms behind, on how nature and history sometimes interject and what happens in between.  

Variaciones de un Antisecreto presents itself as a multiform open project, in progress, alive, centered around an ancient artifact called “bullroarer”, or “bramadera” as different cultures call it, and its physical and symbolic dimensions. Used by many anthropologists to study humanity’s ancestral life and rituals, this artifact still features many mysteries and unknowns. “Bullroarers,” produce very distinctive sounds and historically were utilized for communicating over great distances. Found in all five continents, according to scholar Alan Dundes in his study Men, these were also used by men for initiation rites. It is noteworthy to mention that despite the geographical distance, there is evidence that this artifact was often banned for women.  

Variaciones de un Antisecreto operates as a political statement, a takeover that confronts the gender specificity that almost gives meaning to this artifact, presenting a new possible order, making justice to a slanted past. The artist worked on different levels, from recreating the object itself by woodcarving each piece, to organizing individual and collective activations. One of the videos presented herein, shows a collective activation by the artist herself, along with colleagues and students, during the student takeover of the university in 2018. Against the backdrop of broader feminist uprising witnessed by Chile recently, the collective activation appears to bring a sense of community, solidarity and purpose. The feminine appropriation of this ancient artifact stands in stark contrast with its past, while its simple and narrow shape also contrasts with the complexities of change, of changing norms that have endured time but cannot be tolerated any longer.  

Carla Lucini

Variaciones de un Antisecreto

I am interested in recontextualizing certain ancient sounds. For instance, when you hear a Shofar you immediately know that even though the context is different, that sound has been heard for generations and generations. A while ago, researching the experience of low-frequency sounds and the auditory memory of earthquakes, I came across an object called Churingas, Bullroarers, or Bramaderas, depending on the culture. I became immediately intrigued by it. Its shape, is simple but weird physical properties and specially the historical readings attached to it, expressed in the implications regarding gender roles and rituals.

It was the first sound object I ever made and I remember clearly how meaningful it was to jump from reading about it, to making it and producing sound.

It is hard for me to describe this feeling. First, you feel you are not producing sound, you are actually summoning it, from the wood itself, and from all the other objects that existed thousands of years ago. It also resonates inside of you, which makes you aware of your physical being. I felt connected to this sound and very protective of the object.

I made a few more over the next few years, each having a particular sound depending on the wood and shape, but something else happened. I realized the objects and I were now connected magically. I became aware of its power and temperament. 

In 2018 I was invited, at the university where I taught, by some of my students to make a performance in the context of a feminist takeover of the university. We played 9 objects together and for 15 minutes produced a constant but changing collective sound. All of the women that were present became silent at the end. We knew something had happened, we felt moved and together and deeply connected to something beyond words. We had a secret that we could not understand. Something was conjured that day and after that. I renamed the object Gritona.

A year after I was invited to make something with the Gritonas again, but now in a massive event. In one of the meetings I brought my object to try the sound in the space and a guy took it from my hand saying he wanted to try it. This was the first time a man had played one of my carved Gritonas and he was doing this in the most invasive way. With all his strength he started spinning the object as fast as he could and after 3 seconds the Gritona broke in half. Perplexed he handed it back to me and another woman that was there said: “patriarchy broke your object.” The performance was a disaster. In this gigantic place, several of the Gritonas broke, pieces of wood flying in the air, threads broken and the audience that looked on judgmentally. I understood there that this powerful object was not there to be performed, to feed my artistic ego. I understood that the summoning and movement it generates requires a level of complicity and protection.

The project Variations of an Antisecret is the experience of a recontextualized sound. It started with a desire to appropriate the sense of this instrument, not to make some sort of gender sonic justice, but because I'm interested in resignifying a forbidden sound. This change, in the primary sense of the object, empowers and intrigues me. Besides the metaphysical connotations this object has for me now, I read it as a symbolic and small gesture, taking over spaces that have historically been denied to somebody considered “the other”.

This project is dedicated to all the witches out there.

Constanza Alarcón Tennen

Carla Lucini is an art historian from Buenos Aires, Argentina, currently based in New York. Recently, she was Head of Public Programs department of El Museo del Barrio. In the past few years she was involved in different exhibitions in institutions and independent spaces, including The Illusive Eye at El Museo del Barrio, Vertical Horizons by Nicole Franchy at The Chimney NYC, and Invention by Carmelo Arden Quin at Leon Tovar Gallery. Carla also collaborated with publications such as Vitamin T and Vitamin D3 (Phaidon). Carla holds a Master in Contemporary Art from Sotheby's Institute of Art.