To listen is to be at the encounter with an other. Art Exhibition
To listen is to be at the encounter with an other
A gathering of sonic Counter-Cartographies
5–21 November 2026
BARDO Projektraum, Berlin
Artists: Ale Borea, Kika Echeverría, Javier Vargas, Eli Wewentxu
Curated by: Helga Elsner Torres, Pablo Santacana López, Vicente Barriga
With activations by: VideoClub World and Dracaena
Opening: Thursday, 5 November 2026
About the exhibition
What does it mean to listen to someone, somewhere, or something that dominant narratives have rendered inaudible?
To listen is to be at the encounter with an other brings together four artistic practices connected to Latin America to explore listening as a political gesture and a way of engaging with migration, memory, territory, and resistance.
Through sound installations, sculptural interventions, archival recordings, and experimental forms of transmission, the exhibition questions the structures that determine which voices are heard, which histories are preserved, and which experiences remain at the margins of collective attention.
In a city like Berlin, where migration continuously reshapes cultural and social life, listening becomes more than a sensory experience. It becomes a way to acknowledge the presence of others, engage with histories of displacement, and confront the systems that distinguish between signal and noise, belonging and exclusion.
The exhibition approaches sound as an autonomous form of knowledge, capable of holding experiences that visual and textual representations often leave behind.
Four artistic practices propose distinct ways of listening.
Ale Borea examines listening as surveillance, tracing the relationship between military technologies, personal archives, and information classification. Kika Echeverría activates the sonic memory of Chilean exile through archival radio transmissions and repurposed antennas. Javier Vargas explores the intimate relationship between sound, mechanical movement, absence, and remembrance. Eli Wewentxu brings forward the sounds of Wallmapu, where environmental transformations and Indigenous resistance are registered through the act of listening.
Together, these works challenge Eurocentric regimes of attention and propose alternative sonic cartographies shaped by displacement, colonial histories, ecological struggles, and diasporic memory.
Rather than treating noise as interference, the exhibition understands it as an essential condition of encounter. Listening is not necessarily an act of understanding or agreement. It is an openness to difference, friction, and the possibility of being transformed by what we hear.
To listen is to be at the encounter with an other, inviting visitors to reconsider listening not as passive reception, but as an active, situated, and profoundly political practice.
Exhibited works
Ale Borea — Listening Post
Three short-range FM transmissions, radio receiver, headphones, and archival documents.
Listening Post investigates the infrastructures of surveillance that determine what becomes recognisable as information and what is dismissed as noise. Drawing from the personal archive of the artist’s grandfather, who worked in radar and telecommunications for the Peruvian Armed Forces, Borea examines listening as an instrument of detection, classification, and control.
Ale Borea is a Berlin-based Peruvian sound artist and drummer whose practice draws on Andean and Afro-Peruvian traditions, exploring rhythm as embodied resistance and the body as an archive of migration and collective memory.
Kika Echeverría — Tiny dots began to emerge
Sound installation with antennas and speakers.
Drawing from the archives of Chile al día, a radio programme broadcast by Chilean exiles from East Berlin during Pinochet’s dictatorship, Echeverría explores sound as a carrier of historical memory. Through repurposed antennas and archival material, the installation evokes transmissions that continue to resonate beyond their original moment, connecting past struggles with the present.
Kika Echeverría is a Berlin-based Chilean artist working across sound, performance, and installation. Her practice explores voice, breath, fragility, and the conditions under which bodies and histories become audible.
Javier Vargas — I hear your steps from my room
Sound sculpture and mixed-media installation.
Vargas presents a sculptural triptych combining painting, experimental speakers, and a kinetic instrument. Through mechanical movement, sustained musical notes, and evocative imagery, the work explores the sounds that emerge from memory, isolation, and absence.
Javier Vargas, also known as P0brediabla, is a Berlin-based Chilean artist, psychologist, and multi-instrumentalist. His practice brings together sound sculpture, experimental electronics, painting, and field recordings to investigate memory, grief, and synesthetic experiences.
Eli Wewentxu — Pitxantu: Sound Archives
Field recordings, sound compositions, and multimedia work.
Pitxantu emerges from deep-listening practices in the native forests of Wallmapu. Through recordings of landscapes, walking routes, and environmental sounds, Wewentxu documents a territory transformed by drought, monoculture plantations, and ongoing colonial pressures.
Sound becomes an archive of ecological memory, ancestral relationships, and resistance.
Eli Wewentxu is a Mapuche artist from Gulumapu-Wallmapu, whose work combines improvisation, composition, and field recording. Their practice is deeply connected to the territory, its ecological transformations, and the knowledge carried across generations.
Curatorial team
Helga Elsner Torres is a Peruvian visual artist and researcher based in Berlin. Her multidisciplinary practice addresses identity, contemporary migration, and German–Peruvian postcolonial relationships through artistic research, writing, and cultural education.
Pablo Santacana López is a Spanish curator and researcher working at the intersections of archives, activism, architecture, and performative memory. His projects explore the relationships between cultural production, collective memory, and political space.
Vicente Barriga is a Chilean cultural anthropologist and curator based in Berlin. His research focuses on moving images, collective memory, cultural heritage, territory, and technology. He is co-director of VideoClub World, an international platform for experimental video art.
Public programme
The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of conversations, experimental moving images, acoustic performance, and collective listening experiences.
Thursday, 5 November — Exhibition Opening
Join us for the opening of To listen is to be at the encounter with an other, meet the artists and curators, and experience the installations for the first time.
Saturday, 7 November · 17:00–18:00 — Artist Talk
An encounter with the artistic practices and research processes behind the exhibition. An opportunity to explore how listening connects personal histories, political infrastructures, archives, and territories.
Saturday, 14 November · Time to be confirmed — VideoClub World: Hearing the Lights Elsewhere III
Video screening and conversation
Following presentations in Tokyo and New York, the third edition of Hearing the Lights Elsewhere arrives in Berlin.
Curated by VideoClub World, the screening explores the sonic materiality of moving images, approaching rhythm, music, and sound as fundamental elements in the construction of meaning.
The programme invites audiences to listen to images and encounter sounds that are often forgotten, overlooked, or rendered invisible.
Thursday, 19 November · 18:00–19:00 — Eli Wewentxu + Special Guest
Acoustic performance
A live sonic encounter extending the exhibition’s exploration of memory, territory, and listening through acoustic experimentation and performance.
Friday, 20 November · 19:00 — Finissage with Dracaena
Listening / DJ Set
For the exhibition’s closing evening, Colombian DJ and selector Dracaena transforms listening into a collective and embodied experience.
Drawing on salsa and diasporic musical traditions, her set approaches rhythm as a means of gathering, remembering, and creating connections across geographical and cultural boundaries.
Visit
BARDO Projektraum
Berlin, Germany
Exhibition: 5–21 November 2026
Regular gallery hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 14:00–19:00 (6–20 November)
Credits
Curation Team: Helga Elsner Torres, Pablo Santacana López, Vicente Barriga
Participating artists: Ale Borea, Kika Echeverría, Javier Vargas, Eli Wewentxu
Bardo Team: Florencia Freis, Rocío Martinez
Public programme: VideoClub World, Dracaena, Eli Wewentxu
Venue: BARDO Projektraum
Organisation: Karne Kunst
