Ximena Alarcón

Ximena Alarcón is a sound artist-researcher interested in listening to our sonic migrations: in-between sonic spaces manifested in dreams, underground public transport and cultural and technological mediations in the migratory context. She is a Deep Listening® tutor, with a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation. Throughout her career, she has created telematic sonic improvisations and interfaces for relational listening, to understand sensorially her and others’ migratory experience, as if in search of a collective interface that holds such sonic in-betweeness. Her most recognized works are the interactive sound space Sounding Underground (IOCT-DMU, The Leverhulme Trust Fellowship 2007-2009), the series of telematic sound performances Networked Migrations (CRiSAP - UAL, 2011-2017), and INTIMAL: an embodied physical-virtual system for relational listening to improvise telematically in the context of human migration (RITMO - University of Oslo, 2017-2019, Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship). Emerging from her INTIMAL project, Ximena leads the online-based INTIMAL co-creation collective of Latin American migrant women in Europe listening to our migrations, through dreams and migratory journeys, expanding notions of femininity, territory and care.

As a resident at The Studio, she was awarded the 2021 Studio Recovery Fund to develop independently the INTIMAL App©, a mobile platform that invites people to listen to their “migratory journeys”. Publications derived from her research include a book chapter “Breathing (as Listening): An Emotional Bridge for Telepresence“ in The Body in Sound, Music and Performance (2022) Ed by Linda O’Keefe and Isabel Nogueira. Also, she has published articles such as ”Sonic Proximities: Locating Oneself and the Others Within a “Migratory Journey” " (2022), and "Sensing Place and Presence in an INTIMAL Long-Distance Improvisation” (2019), in the Journal of Network Music and Arts; “Conceptual design for INTIMAL: a physical/virtual embodied system for Relational Listening” (2019), in the Journal of Somaesthetics; "Networked Migrations: listening to and performing the in-between space”, (2014) in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies; and “Embodied Sonic Memories of Commuting Underground,” (2017) published in 2020 at IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology.