Jimena Maldonado (born 1988) is a Mexican composer living in the UK and the Netherlands. She uses her experience as a photographer to experiment with the relationship between music and visual elements. Her work explores the way that music and image interact and influence each other and how this relationship affects the perceptions of both performer and audience.
"Intervened Memory" is a large scale piece for viola da gamba and electronics based on Mexican artist Cristian Pineda’s Yo soy mi casa ("I am my house"), a series of ten photographs that have been digitally overlaid with drawings. These poignant images were taken in Juchitán, Oaxaca after catastrophic earthquakes in September 2017. Pineda’s digital interventions "repopulate" the images with graffiti-like doodles whose fantastical iconography – strange beasts, abundant plant life, disembodied eyes and limbs – recalls traditional Zapotec art.
Now Maldonado undertakes musical interventions upon these images that evoke memory and nostalgia through electronic loops and canons, drones and percussive textures, environmental sounds and electronic feedback. © Birmingham Record Company