Sudamericana tiene memoria del aire
Laurel V. McLaughlin
with Constanza Alarcón Tennen
In the multimedia installation Sudamericana tiene memoria del aire on view at the NARS Foundation, Constanza Alarcón Tennen creates an environment in which attunement among earth and bodies is tethered and intertwined through desire. In the following conversation, Constanza and I discuss the research, poetics, activations, and publication which shaped chapter II of her trilogy.
Laurel V. McLaughlin (LVM): Thank you for joining me in conversation, Constanza. How did the trilogy “Nazca/Sudamericana” take shape in your practice; and could you briefly describe the three parts?
Constanza Alarcón Tennen (CAT): The trilogy was a point of arrival for a few different lanes. I had been thinking a lot about how natural phenomena tends to be understood morally, or more so, how events of nature are read under a moralizing lens. This, to me, raises a few questions regarding our ability to be in tune to nature’s rhythms and logics, which can lead to a precarious intertwining of our human lives within a greater ecosystem. At the same time, I was thinking that the language of geology was actually very poetic and erotic. I was captured by concepts such as subduction, which describes the way some tectonic plates interact. I decided to create a project conceived as the construction of a poetic and material story, regarding a non-scientific relationship between the tectonic plates of Nazca and South America. Concepts from the field of geology were poetically reimagined to think of a narrative where the tension between the plates results from an erotic and sensual attraction. I set myself to create works that would not be an illustration of a geological problem, but instead a metaphorical interpretation based on the interaction between the plates. I imagined that Nazca and Sudamericana were lovers, and all the earthquakes were the result of that tension and desire.
I wrote a poem first, originally called “Pulse,” which later became “El Prólogo de Nazca.” The poem was written from the perspective of the Nazca plate and of desire, then I made the sound piece, and eventually the video performance and sculptures that became chapter I. I concluded that the two first chapters of the trilogy would each be dedicated to one tectonic Plate, I for Nazca, II for Sudamericana. Chapter III, which I haven’t created yet, will be dedicated to their interaction.
LVM: This exhibition at the NARS Foundation focuses on the second part of the trilogy, Sudamericana tiene memoria del aire, featuring a multimedia installation composed of video with sound composition, ceramic whistles, and site-specific elements of dirt and light, emerging from the poem you described. How do you see the various parts of the installation coalescing together in synergy with your research on seismic phenomena?
CAT: I think that as the parts of the project don’t explicitly relate to the research on seismic events, it is actually a more poetic approach. This idea of reading geology or earthquakes from a perspective of symbolic interpretation, from a subjectivity more aligned with an idea of ecology that is intertwined with experience and knowledge, feels more complete to me. But I would say, the research I’ve done in relation to geology and seismic activity informs this poetic imagination, it feeds the cosmogony that becomes the work.
LVM: In an artist talk at Boston University earlier this fall, you articulated the idea of “old sound” as a point of research departure, but also as a source of animation for the multimedia installation. You worked with collaborators for an opening performance on October 17th in order to activate the sound sculptures—how does this performance activate installation?
CAT: The sculptures that comprise the work and that are a fundamental part of the installation, are ceramic sounding objects that I understand as reciprocal sculptures. Conceived as multisensory and bidirectional artifacts, they are pieces to be seen, touched, and activated by sound. They are pieces that require our action to fulfill their sonic nature. Hence the bidirectionality.
These works are part of an investigation into sound/haptic objects, artifacts that transcend a stable notion of sculpture, and instead occupy a non-hierarchical place linked to sensuality, and as extensions of the body. They are inspired by pre-Columbian sound artifacts and are part of a larger body of works that arise from poetic interpretations of tectonic desire. I believe that an unstable notion of sculpture, one that exists in flux, allows the art-object to be understood as having more than one life or functionality. The pieces can exist as suspended sculptures, but they are also sounding instruments and body extensions. This simultaneous material nature is at the core of the pieces.
LVM: We pursued a publication with contributions from curator, writer, and art historian Madeline Murphy Turner; curator and poet Paola Nava; performer, choreographer, and writer Jonathan González, you, and myself. How do you imagine this publication framing this second chapter of the trilogy for this exhibition?
CAT: I think that perhaps the publication serves as an appendix, as a sort of side project that allows us to expand some of the ideas of the exhibition through the perspective and very diverse views of the contributing writers. It also serves as a vehicle of archive, as a testament that this particular thing happened in this particular place at this particular time. It marks a temporal event.
LVM: Finally, how do both chapters I and II reorient viewers to the horizontal and vertical, respectively? You mention these axes in your the poem:
Verticality is mine, the horizontal I share with you
/
La verticalidad es mía, lo horizontal lo comparto contigo
CAT: The choreographic work developed for both of the video performances that form chapters I and II, emphasize a physical orientation. I guess you could call it the horizontal and the vertical, but I was actually thinking more of ground vs air. I am more interested in thinking of an aspect of nature as the axis rather than a geometrical description. In the choreographic work developed for chapter I, we emphasized on the ground, so the performers keep a low center of gravity. The installation highlighted this by having all the sculptures installed directly on the floor on top of slabs of rocks. For chapter II, I thought a lot about how the Andes Mountains had grown out of the interaction of the plates, therefore providing, in a way, a direct connection between the air of the heights and the subterranean motion of the tectonic plates. This is why in Sudamericana tiene memoria del aire, the performers put most of the attention in the movement and sequences of hands and arms, and there’s a part where one is literally lifted upwards outside of the video frame. I used the same criteria for the elements that comprise the installation, as all of them are suspended by ropes, in a way marking their groundlessness.
The line of the poem refers to the idea that the interaction of the plates moves in a way horizontally (from west to east), which is the motion of their encounter. The idea of verticality here refers to the ascension of the Andes, as the mountain range keeps growing due to the interaction of the plates, when the oceanic Nazca Plate slides under the continental mass that corresponds to the Southamerican continent.
Constanza Alarcón Tennen is an artist from Chile working at the intersection of sound, sculpture, video, and performance. She is interested in transmaterial dialogues and in recent years has focused her practice in an integrated view on fiction and the possibilities of eroticism, and haptics, as lenses through which to see the world of both human and non-human entities. She graduated from a BFA at Universidad Católica de Chile and the MFA in Sculpture at Yale University. Her work has been shown internationally at venues such as PS122 (NY), Patricia Ready Gallery (Santiago), The XIII New Media Biennial (Chile), Atelierhaus Salzamt (Linz), among others. She has participated in residencies such as The Vermont Studio Center (VT), Delfina Foundation (London), B.A.S.E Tsonami (Valparaíso) and AIM at the Bronx Museum (NY). Alongside her artistic practice, Constanza is a teacher. She not-so-recently published her first poetry compilation as an artist's book with Otra Sinceridad independent press.
Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, is a writer, curator, art historian, and educator working as the Curator and the Director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries. Her scholarship and curating explores research-based sculpture, installation, new media, and social practice works activated by performance concerning formal liminalities, globalized migration, and ecological networks. She has shared her work in conferences ranging from Performance Studies International, Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, the College Art Association, and the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present. She has published writing in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, ASAP Journal, Women & Performance, among others, and recently co-edited the multidisciplinary reader Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production (Amherst College Press, 2024). McLaughlin's curatorial work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Dutch Consulate of New York, and the Teiger Foundation, and she is currently undertaking a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship for an exhibition How do you throw a brick through a window….
All images are Installation views, Sudamericana tiene memoria del aire, NARS Foundation, New York, October 10–November 5, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.