Inherited Space, Inherited Sound

This text was part of a talk/performance, thanks to an invitation from MoMA, New York, Thursday October 22, 2026.

INSTRUMENTS BY TEENAGE ENGINEERING (teenage.engineering)

THANKS TO: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, LEONARDO BRAVO, LEA DICKERMAN, THE ESTATE OF GORDON MATTA-CLARK, JESSAMYN FIORE, AMANDA RIESMAN, TEENAGE ENGINEERING.

TRANSCRIPT:

Inherited space, inherited sound. Before New York. The first time I came to New York, I had the strange feeling that I had already been here. 

I knew the streets. I knew the buildings. I recognized the fire escapes, the storefronts, the scale of the sidewalks, the way the city seemed to hold several times at once. Of course, I had never lived here. 

What I recognized was an image of New York that had already entered my imagination through American culture, through music, film, television, art, architecture. That recognition was intimate, but it was also political. It came from the enormous reach to make the enormous reach of American culture and its ability to make one place appear universal while other places appear peripheral. 

But after moving here, I began to understand that I was recognizing something else, too. I was recognizing an artistic language that had been forming in my life long before I had. I had a name for it. 

Today I want to talk about the making of Splitting Absence. My opera inspired by Gordon Matta-clark's work. But I also want to talk about how I arrived to to to his work through theatre, electronic music, Chilean history, family, friendships, migration, and the downtown New York artist I first encountered from a distance.

I thought I was discovering Gordon Matta-clark, but slowly I realized I was discovering the hidden architecture of my own artistic formation. 

I'm a Chilean artist, a composer and cultural organizer. My work moves between opera, electronic music, theater, film and the creation of spaces where artists can meet. 

The form changes from project to project. The questions remain surprisingly consistent. How do we carry the places we have left? What happens when a private memory becomes part of a shared history? How can sound bring us closer to an experience that belongs initially to somebody else? 

I grew up close to a world in Chile that was artistic, experimental and political. My uncle, the artist Carlos Gallardo, who lived with us during my teen years, was part of the escena de Avanzada, as well as his friend, the artist Carlos Leppe, who joined our dinner table. 

I did not grow up inside a movement in the official sense. I grew up inside a network of people, conversations, exhibitions, arguments, friendships, and informal forms of knowledge. 

That's me, by the way. Really young. 

That distinction matters to me. Artistic history is often written as if it happens through clearly named groups. But many of us encounter art through proximity a relative, a friend, a dinner, a studio, a rehearsal, a story that somebody tells. Years later. 

When I was twelve, I had the opportunity to meet Robert Rauschenberg during his exhibition in Santiago in the eighties. I was too young to understand the work in any complete way, but I understood that art could alter the atmosphere of a room. It could make ordinary materials feel charged, it could make the social situation around the work part of the work. 

I inherited an artistic world before I inherited an artistic vocabulary. 

That inheritance was not a set of instructions. It was permission. Permission to move between mediums. To distrust. Distrust fixed categories and to understand that a work could be a place where different lives meet. 

Around the age of fourteen, I also got my hands on my first synthesizer and started experimenting with music, and then came back to music through theater in college. I was writing and directing plays, and I began and began making music for the stage. At first I thought of music as something that supported the action. But eventually I realized that the sound was not outside the theater. It was another body inside it. 

I wanted to bring the different things I was doing together language, voices, bodies, images, electronics, and live presence. Opera became a way to do that. 

I approached opera with the instruments. I knew synthesizers, samplers, recordings, and the voice. I did not come to it through an idea of opera as a fixed historical form. In fact, I hated opera. I came to it through the independent scene, through theater, and through a desire to construct an experience in which different materials could remain visible or audible at the same time. 

In my teens, I had discovered Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Klaus Nomi. They each opened a different door. Laurie Anderson showed me that a voice could be a narrator, an instrument, a machine, and a body at the same time. Meredith Monk showed me how much could happen through a reduced vocabulary of sounds and gestures. Philip Glass and Steve Reich taught me to hear repetition as architecture. Repetition is not simply the same thing happening again. It changes the space around the thing. Klaus Nomi showed me that the body could be artificial, theatrical, strange, and emotionally exposed all at once. These artists helped me understand that music could create a world without explaining that world completely. 

My first operas came from my own life experiences. Patria was born from my aunt and uncles, exiled during the dictatorship in Chile. Tantalo is based on the story of Omayra Sanchez, a Colombian girl whose death after a volcano after a disaster was broadcast around the world. Arequipa was composed from the death of my girlfriend at the time and many other Chileans in a plane crash in Peru. REI addressed the history of the occupation and annexation of Mapuche territories in the eighteen hundreds. These works were all different from one another, but I was trying to do something similar in each one. I wanted to remain with an event after the speed of information have passed. I wanted to make a place where people could stay with that, with what had happened. 

Then after REI, I stopped making opera for almost twenty years. I thought I had finished with the form. I no longer felt that opera offered me a way of thinking that I needed. That change with Paraiso, my fifth opera. I only want to mention it briefly because it clarified something essential about my own practice. The work grew out of years of listening to a woman who became part of our family after coming to care for our child. Her experience of migration and her child's later discovery of their precarious status made me understand that listening is not passive. Listening changes your position. It makes you responsible for how you carry a story that is not originally yours. Working with the poet Natasha Tiniacos, I use fragments, overlapping thoughts, field recordings, historical recordings, and voices that do not resolve into one complete explanation. I think of my operas as puzzles. I give the audience clues, but I want them to participate in making meaning. That method became important for Splitting/Absence. I did not want to make a biography of Gordon Matta-Clark. I wanted to create a space where the audience can move among traces, ideas, voices, and absence and feel that they are assembling a structure themselves. 

I began composing opera in the late nineties because I wanted to tell stories in music that reflect Latin American reality. I did not want to take Greek stories and adapt them. I want to find new stories and to find forms that could hold the complexity of contemporary experience. 

I received a book about Gordon Matta-Clark by Jessamyn Fiore, and when I opened it, I saw and I knew about this famous images. Buildings, open walls, cut rooms made unstable. But reading the book changed the temperature of the work for me. At first, I was drawn to him because the neighborhood where I now live was full of his colleagues. Anderson. Monk. Brown. Wilson. Artists who have been heroes of mine would have been his neighbors. Gordon became a point of connection for the neighborhood and for me. Then I remembered that he was also Chilean to his father, Roberto Matta, a surrealist painter that changed the distance between us. It did not make him familiar exactly, but it made me want to understand the connection. So then I stopped seeing only the cuts. I began to see memory, silence, social space and emotional weight of what is missing. 

My view of Matta-Clark is not primarily about destruction. I'm not interested in the cut as a spectacular gesture. I'm interested in the cut as an opening and in the light that appears through it. His interventions changed the relationship between inside and outside, private and public observer and observed a building can become at the same time shelter and ruin, interior and exterior, object and event, architecture and anarchitecture. The viewer does not remain outside the work. Your position changes. You move. You look obliquely, you lose orientation, and you become part of the work's production. 

In one of his cards, Matta-clark wrote that music is a non-lumina space, a space that can be heard but not seen. That sentence became a key to the opera. It allowed me to think of sound as a kind of architecture, not a structure that contains your physically, but a structure that changes how you inhabit time, memory and relation. The opera began with a question what is the sound of light? I used what I had in front of me photographs, writings, art cards, buildings that no longer exist and try to explain to myself what I was seeing. 

An opera is a story in music. The sound has to carry the thinking, so the piece is generally slow, layered and patient. There is a lot happening, but the layers do not announce themselves all at once. You have to remain present and pay attention to what is moving underneath. 

As I began researching Matta-Clark, I also began to see the Chilean artists around him clearly. It's not my intention to invent a Chilean artistic movement in New York where there was not one. But I do not want to appreciate. But I do want to appreciate that Chilean artists were not incidental figures in the history of downtown experimentation. There were artists such as Carmen Beuchat, Juan Downey, Francisco Copello, Sylvia Palacios Whitman. There were relationships to 112 Green Street Gallery to dance studios, to Robert Wilson's early work, to performance video, improvisation and the changing spaces of Soho and the Lower East Side. 

As a note, I want to tell you that very recently has been unearthed that Gordon Matta-clark lived with Robert Wilson in the same apartment for a couple of months. 

What existed was not one unified Chilean scene. It was a series of crossings, artists sharing spaces, friendships, studios, performances, collaborators, and methods. This is what I recognize from my own experience. Artistic communities are often built through partial connections. One person introduces another. A musician enters a theater project. A dancer appears in a performance by a visual artist. A restaurant becomes a meeting place, a rehearsal space. Become an archive. Matta-Clark's FOOD. The restaurant interests me for this reason. It was not only a restaurant, it was an artistic proposition about gathering nourishment and the social life of a space. 112 Green Street was not simply a venue, it was a condition of possibility. This is where his work becomes urgent for me now. Gordon's practice remind us of the importance of manual work, of being physically present, and of making something that requires another body to experience it. We are often told that virtual environments will solve the problem of community. And I do not believe that they can replace the physical encounter. 

What I'm trying to do with the idea of Gordon Matta-Clark and with his work, is use it as a channel to help Progress. I do not mean Progress as a return to the belief that technology of development automatically makes society better. I mean Progress as the possibility of finding new ways to communicate, to work together, and to make space for other people. Gordon's work can help us think about that, because it does not only reveal what is already there. It creates a condition for something else to happen. Through the cut, we can encounter perhaps another person on the other side of the light or the darkness. 

His unfinished Losaida Youth Program Guggenheim Grant proposal remains relevant and more timely than ever. He was imagining ways of working with young people in the neighborhood, creating tools for communication and participation. That proposal was not only about art. It was about making conditions in which people could speak to one another. I think of these relationships as vasos communicantes communications vessels, a building, a body, a city, a memory, a performance. Each can carry something from one place to another. The role of the artist is sometimes to open the tube. 

The history of downtown New York that I encountered through music. Anderson, Glass, monk, the performance. The dance world was not separate from the visual art and architecture around it. It was a shared ecology. When I moved to New York, I realized that the music I had discovered in Chile as a teenager was connected to a physical geography. The sounds had come from somewhere. The gestures, collaborations, and experiments had taken place in buildings, apartments, restaurants, galleries, lofts and streets. 

The Lower East Side was not just a place I had arrived in. It was a place that had already been speaking through my imagination. 

The father son relationship became then unavoidable. Roberto Matta came from Chile, passed through Europe and found refuge in New York during a period of fast fascism and war. He painted inner landscapes as if the psyche were a cosmos. His spaces were unstable, expansive and full of forces that could not be seen directly. Gordon inherited that world, but he did not reproduce it. He translated it. Roberto opened a space pictorially. Gordon opened it. Physically. Roberto turned the psyche into a cosmos. Gordon turned the building into an unstable psyche. Roberto dissolved the horizon and Gordon cut through the wall. In nineteen seventy one, Gordon traveled to Chile. He was interested in the early stages of Salvador Allende's government, but he was also wanting to see his father at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Gordon made a vertical shaft cut from a basement bathroom towards the ceiling, lined with mirrors to bring sunlight into a dark interior. The work was temporary. It disappeared. What remains are photographs and the memory of an opening that is no longer there. I have never stood inside Claraboya. I have only looked at the photographs. But I began to hear music when I looked at them. It was a work about light, but also about absence. It connected the hidden and the visible, the underground and the sky, the institution and the body. I sometimes imagine Roberto as the atom and Gordon as a smaller particle trying to move beyond the father's pole. This is not a scientific claim. It is a way of thinking about inheritance. The son does not simply continue the father's world. He enters it. It's the smallest, smallest spaces and discovers that there are other forces there. Gordon's community was also surrounded by ideas about Buddhism, Einstein, light, and the microscopic structure of reality. Robert Wilson spoke about Einstein. Juan Downey used light to create systems of information. Trisha Brown and Carmen Beuchat transformed movement into drawings and spatial propositions. These were not identical practices, but they were connected by a desire to understand matter differently, to ask what exists between one thing and another, and how perception changes when we move through that interval. Laurie Anderson. Once connected, gardens cut to his fractured relationship with Roberto. Maybe that is part of the story, but I do not want to reduce the cut to a psychological illustration of an absent father. I see the cut as more than rupture. I see it as rich an opening toward a shared space. Splitting absence is not a telling of Gordon Matta-clark story. It is not an examination of his work. It does not ask the audience to look at an architectural cut and understand it once and for all. The opera is built from fragments, Gordon's writings, archival images, cities voices, electronic sounds, projected images, historical traces, and the spaces between what can be known and what has disappeared. I want the structure of the opera to behave like memory, not as a clean sequence, but as a constellation. The theatrical influence of Robert Wilson is also important here. I studied theater in the early nineties, and Wilson was one of my heroes. I was fascinated by his use of time, minimal gesture, light, and chiaroscuro the way a small action could remain visible long enough for its meaning to change. Learning that Gordon had performed in two of Wilson's early plays made me made another connection. Gordon was not only adjacent to the visual art and architecture of downtown, he was also inside the theater world that was thinking about duration, gesture, light, and the body. Over the years, my theater work gradually entered my opera work when I began making opera. I saw it as an unoccupied space, a place where singers, designers, musicians, performers, and visual artists could collaborate. I was not trying to modernize opera from the outside. I was trying to cut it in, to cut into it from within. That is why the comparison between Matta-clark's architecture and my opera feels meaningful to me. I'm trying to do with opera what he did with buildings. Open an existing structure so that other possibilities can appear. working again with Natasha Tiniakos has allowed me the language to remain active and unstable. The performers, musicians, designers and visual artists changed the work as they enter it. The piece does not arrive fully formed and ask them to execute it. It is changed by their their knowledge. And that is also why the first presentation at the Clemente Center was important to me. We had only a short time to rehearse and much of the work happened in my apartment. It was not an ideal rehearsal space in the conventional sense, but it became the right space. The work became intimate, porous and alive. After the performance, a woman came to me and told me that she had dated Gordon and helped hang the shows at Green Street. She said the work reminded her of that time, not because it was polished, but because it was alive that. Stay with me. I want the work to be alive enough that memory can recognize itself inside it. The opera is unfolding through several cities Santiago, New York, Paris, Chicago and Genoa. These are not simply settings. Each city is a different instrument. Santiago is the city of the father. The failed encounter. Clara Salomon de Allende and my own family history. New York is the city of the downtown network. Food one hundred and twelve Green Street. Migration and my own artistic arrival. Paris is connected to Roberto Marta's realism, exile and the European artistic mythology that surrounds the family. Chicago is home. Gordon's last cut. History, and it also brings a different architectural imagination and a large, vibrant Latinx community into the project. Genoa adds another way to think about light and the opening of architecture. Gordon's a W whole house. A whole house contains both horizontal cuts that move through space, and an atrium cut that removes the capstone of the building. Light enters from above and the interior becomes something that can be read through movement. I think of Genoa as a continuation of what began in Santiago. In Clarabella, light is brought into a hidden part of the museum in Genoa. Gordon is refining the possibility of opening a structure so that we can understand what is happening on the other side. And this trajectory leads toward day's end, a place that had actually been inhabited. Gordon was not only revealing a building, he was giving people light access and the possibility of being present together. I want to imagine that feeling musically, the very ordinary emotion of realizing that an idea works because light is entering the room. I do not want to make one finished opera and then move. Move it and change from city to city. That would contradict Matta-clark's own logic. Each section has to be developed in the place where history is active with local artists and local communities. The city has to be allowed to alter the work. The text can move between English, Spanish and Italian, not as translation in the narrow sense, but as a repetition that changes its resonance as it travels. This is connected to the way I work through Neo-Latin Wave. We created the organization because I knew Latinx artists who knew of one another, but were not necessarily encountering each other, collaborating or sharing resources. The goal was not simply to present individual artists, it was to create conditions for encounters and exchange a festival, a record, a performance, or a conventional. A conversation can make an introduction possible. Sometimes that introduction becomes the beginning of another person's work. Community is not background infrastructure. It is part of the composition. When I look across my different activities opera, film, music, theatre, curation, new Latin wave, I see recurring subjects migration, loss, identity, memory, and belonging. I also see a recurring action bringing things into relation. A voice besides a recording, a poem besides an electronic sound. An artist beside another artist. A private experience inside. Inside a public space. When I work in film, I'm listening for the director's intention and trying to understand how music can participate in the world they are making. I am not the director. I'm one part of the machinery and my responsibility is to enter the work with attention. My own projects are similar. The people I invite bring knowledge and experiences that change what the work can become. This is why Paraiso matters to splitting absence. Paraiso taught me that listening changes our relationship to a story and creates a responsibility for how we carry it. In splitting absence, I'm listening to Matta-clark, to the people around him, to the Chilean artists in downtown New York, to Roberto and Gordon, and to the cities that continue to hold their traces. But I'm also listening to the spaces between them. That may be what an opera can do. It can make an absence audible without filling it in. It can allow several stories, several stories to coexist without forcing them into one explanation. Now, I think I was also recognizing a history that had been present in my life without yet having a name. Santiago was already inside New York. New York was already inside the music I had made in Chile. The artist I thought I had discovered as a teenager was connected to a downtown history that also included Chilean artists. My family and eventually me. This is what I mean by inheritance. It is not a straight line from a father to a son or from one generation to another. It is more like sound passing through a building. It changes as it moves. It is absorbed, reflected, distorted and heard somewhere else. Matta-clark leaves us openings, not answers. A hole in a ceiling. A shaft of light. A room suddenly connected to another room. Maybe an opera can do something similar. It can make a space where different pieces of history become audible together. And maybe the work is not the cut itself. Maybe the work is what becomes possible. On the other side of it. 


Written by Sokio, for the performance Inherited Space, Inherited Sound.
Thanks to Leonardo Bravo, Leah Dickerman and the MoMA team. Thanks to Teenage Engineering for their continuous support. Special thanks to Jessamyn Fiore, from The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark.