Mud and Stick Band by Natalia (Nika) Sorzano, is part of Proximity Music: Echoes of Entropy, a joint exhibition program initiated by iii and Rewire. Natalia (Nika) Sorzano is also part of the Not to be Senseless programme, organized by iii in collaboration with Journey Through the Senses and Rewire. Curated by Maria Oosterveen.

Tree trunks, rocks, ceramics, and remnants of pop-culture waste come together to form an unlikely musical band. In Mud and Sticky Band, wonky monster-like figures emit noises and voices that merge to create an interactive sonic experience. Long nails and hair extensions merged with soil and wood create a sense of instability and offness. In this tactile installation, these dissident characters examine how texture, sound, shape, form, and space interact in constructing desire, posing questions of how people relate to “nature” and their environment.

Natalia (Nika) Sorzano has a background in law and fine art and is based between Colombia and the Netherlands. She transforms mass-produced and found objects into symbolic artifacts using materials like paint, textiles, and rope. Her practice communicates beyond language through songs and videos that create macabre and fantastical reimaginings of reality, examining themes of everyday life, violence, desire, and politics.

More from the artist

“From 2021 I began to experiment with sculptural hybrids between organic remains and waste that I now see as contaminated/assimilated entities. I experimented with tree trunks, rocks, ceramics and pop cultural waste remains. These trials took the shape of wonky monsters when I incorporated mainstream beauty industry items, such as long nails and hair extensions. The merging of these materials seemed off and unstable. It led me to wonder about the material’s own agency and its disobedience and/or tendencies toward hybridity. I started to see these figures as dissident characters, their eroticism and stubbornness inspired this project. Mud and Sticky Band has become a research-based work that has concluded in multiple outcomes, such as a sculptural-based music band that emits sound and voices from its insides taking the shape of a sound installation. 

The research process has consisted of site-visits to natural and urban locations around the Netherlands in order to explore desire with sound, texture, movement and shape. I took Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology as an instruction manual to navigate these locations while analyzing the relationship between bodies, space, more-than-human species and matter. Some of these methods included intuitive collection of objects and their re-organization, recordings of soundscapes, thorough notations of movements and choreographs instigated by the space, thorough descriptions of the landscape, conversations with friends, workshops with students, among others.

This embodied research has been guided by an interest in finding new ways of relating to ‘nature’ and the environment, while allowing my own desire and subjectivity to be moved and transformed by this relation. With this work I explore how texture, sound, shape, form, space and other material and formal qualities are in dialogue in the construction of my desire, embracing it as a collective eco-socially mediated process between bodies, spaces and matter. I am interested in finding how the ensemble of these qualities can create new shapes and orientations, new settings where these elements become an extension of (and beyond) myself.”

Natalia (Nika) Sorzano is also part of the Not to be Senseless programme.
Mud and Sticky Band was made during the HCA Residency Program in Roodkapje Rotterdam (2022 – 2023) with support of the CBK Rotterdam and the Mondriaan Fonds. 
Sound Piece commissioned by Honey Kraiwee and Showroom Mama. Mixed by Bergur Anderson. 
Special thanks to: Roodkapje and Marloes de Vries, Paula Pineda, Public and Private minor students from the WdKA, Céline Wouters and Valeria Velázquez.