ARTIST STATEMENT

My aesthetic proposal is what I call Re-Enchantment (Reencantamiento). Re-Enchantment is a reaction to what Max Weber called “the Disenchantment of the World,” by which he meant that, with the arrival of Modernity came the gradual dissolution of the beliefs in the sacred, the superstitious, and the magical. Modernity created our current secular and technological spaces. However, there is a longing for transcendence, a longing to encounter the divine. Re-Enchantment, thus, proposes a “return” under a post-modern mode to search again, at least artistically, within the realms of the sacred. 

This search for the transcendent, for the manifestation of “something other” is what drives my artistic proposal. I propose to encounter in my music what Lorca calls “duende,” that mysterious force that can make experiencing a performance as something not from the ordinary material world but as a manifestation of “something other” (spiritual, divine). My aesthetics is a transfiguration into music of the ideas proposed by John Milbank and the French philosophers of the theological turn such as Michel Henry and above all, Jean-Luc Marion. Besides Lorca’s duende, I also take inspiration from medieval Sephardic writings and from Latin American Realismo Mágico in its decided embracing of the magical within everyday life. I put together sacred themes with a contemporary musical language and see if something can “appear” from that experience. I try to create “resurrections” and put them out there, hoping they can inject “enchantment” into our world.