The ATL project (water in Nahuatl) is a piece of sound art, which consisted of the realization of a nightly concert on water held in Lake Chapultepec, Mexico City, on December 5 and 6, 2014. This sound intervention, organized in collaboration with the musician Alejandro Escuer, consisted of narrating the history of the Valley of Mexico from a series of electro-acoustic combinations between water sounds, percussions, bass flutes and recordings by a choir of 50 school children National Music. ATL served as an invitation to citizen appreciation and reflection on the importance of water and the historical value of this resource for the population.
ATL: Liquid Testimony is a stage project of sound and visual art that I have developed with Alejandro Escuer since 2013. Its axis is water and its role in the history of the Valley of Mexico: before the 16th century the basin held five large lakes, dozens of rivers and countless canals, and since the Conquest it has undergone a constant effort of drainage and piping, while the city imports water from other regions. The project combines electroacoustic music with multichannel diffusion, flutes made from water pipes, percussion, choir, intervened historical images (maps from the 16th to the 20th century) and installations of lit, amplified water.
Development
During 2013 and 2014 we composed the main electroacoustic work, with more than a hundred sounds of water pipes, water sources, bass flutes, percussion, voices and bowls processed electroacoustically. We also worked on an installation version with five screens, one for each of the lakes of the basin, water vessels played live by percussionists and a real-time link with the delta of the Copala river in Guerrero. The stage version culminated in the night concert on Lake Chapultepec in December 2014.
Proposal for the Presa de la Olla (2022)
In 2022 we proposed a new version of ATL as an open-air sound-art installation-concert for the Parque Presa de la Olla in Guanajuato, for the 50th anniversary of the Festival Internacional Cervantino, with Alejandro Escuer, Rodrigo Sigal and myself. The proposal included a water screen on the reservoir, speakers around the water, musicians and a boat, with texts by Nezahualcóyotl as a starting point.
