TURN + BIENALSUR 2025 in Buenos Aires - Shindou suru utsuwa / Cuenco vibrante

Opening: Wednesday, December 3rd, 4 p.m Since its first edition, BIENALSUR - UNTREF has promoted various initiatives in collaboration with TURN, an artistic project of the Tokyo University of the Arts. Its main objective is to embrace cultural differences and foster the exchange of knowledge and traditions. Regardless of their different approaches, the pursuits have been consistently the same: working from the perspective of artistic and cultural encounters with diverse communities, focusing on their specific needs, practices and actions. For the 2025 edition, activities and collaborations were undertaken with deaf and hearing-impaired communities in Tokyo and Buenos Aires. Paradoxically, the central element that drove these encounters was sound, understood as tactile vibration, which displaced the preeminence of auditory perception. In this convergence of senses, sound artist Juan Sorrentino (ARG), an artist, professor and researcher at UNTREF, completed a residency in Tokyo. It was there that he developed activities linking his work with visual, sensory, tactile and inaudible sound experiences. Similarly, Japanese artist and ceramist Asuka Shikiba proposed research focused on creating concave pieces which, through their symbolic and tactile qualities, were capable of generating vibrant resonances. This was carried out in collaboration with hard-of-hearing individuals in Casacusia and deaf women in Casa Hogar. In this context, the expression “vibrant utsuwa” is used. Originally from Japanese and without a single clear equivalent in Spanish, the term utsuwa refers to all kinds of receptacles or containers (such as bowls and vessels). However, it can also be applied to the human body, in the sense of its capacity to receive. Additionally, its etymology conveys a meaning of emptiness understood as space or concavity. This plurality of meanings contained in the word allows for the reverberation of each container object both in itself and in interaction with the body, pointing to vibration as the vehicle that makes us feel together, connected, and intertwined.