BoCA Summer School: Sculpting Voices, with Niño de Elche

Workshop “Sculpting voices”
With Niño de Elche (Spain)

A voice workshop is a space where voices are worked on, in other words, where air and its soul are sculpted. Voices are a constant product of bodies, and they pass through them in resonance tubes that are also made up of flows, liquids and an endless number of different fluids. Each human being is made up of dozens of voices that constitute a wide variety of identities. So, in this workshop, the “ex-flamenco” musician Niño de Elche proposes that we understand voices more as a facilitating lie than a pure and authentic truth.
There are voices that are broken, torn, clean, dirty, but also tired, sweaty, exhausted, alive. Voices as a dialogue between inside and outside, between the deepest self and what is constructed from the ordinary. Voices as a materialistic phenomenon, but also as a spiritual achievement. The voices that sound and the voices that are imagined can be the same, as long as we recognise ourselves in them. A voice in the distance always implies that we are listening in suspense for what is to come. Do we listen to it?

BIOGRAPHY
Niño de Elche (Elche, Spain, 1985. Lives in Madrid, Spain) is an undisciplined ex-flamenco artist who manages to combine genres such as flamenco, free improvisation, krautrock or electronic, electroacoustic or contemporary music with poetry, performance, dance or theatre in his different artistic proposals.
The hybrid character of his work is revealed in the heterogeneity of the proposals to which he is able to respond as an artist and musician. From his participation in documenta 14 with the show “La farsa monea”, alongside artists Pedro G. Romero and dancer Israel Galván, to his musical collaborations with groups such as Los Planetas or C. Tangana. He has also taken part in films such as “Niños somos todos”, by director Sergi Cameron, and has written autobiographical essays. It’s also worth mentioning the album “Voces del extremo” (2015), the project “Antología del cante flamenco heterodoxo” (2018) and the installation “Auto sacramental invisible” at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), a sound performance based on the photographer José Val del Omar, which shows the artist’s interest in historical research and reconstruction. He was awarded the Gaudí Prize for Best Original Music (2021), among others.