** Edition of 250 ** El Llamado begins as a gesture in the air: a performative work for solo or multiple voices, articulated through whistles of different sizes, materials, shapes, and cultural origins. Commissioned in 2020 by Maison des Arts Georges & Claude Pompidou, it is conceived as a flexible framework rather than a closed score. Duration, spatial layout, and number of performers are never fixed in advance; they are continually adapted to the specific circumstances of each presentation, whether an intimate indoor intervention or a diffuse outdoor action. Each whistle becomes a simple yet charged device for projection and address, amplifying breath into signal and transforming the act of calling - of sending sound out into shared space - into a collective instrument.
El Llamado (Der Aufruf) condenses this open, situational work into a fixed arrangement composed and realised specifically for publication. Here, the repertoire of whistles itself becomes an index of circulation and displacement. Sourced from Austria, Germany, Italy, China, Spain, Greece, Hong Kong, Portugal, France, India, Mexico, the United States, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, Japan, and Nepal, these objects carry with them traces of different uses and symbolic charges: toys, alarms, sporting accessories, ritual tools, cheap souvenirs. In the studio, they are not neutralised into anonymous tones but allowed to reveal their specific timbres, frictions, and quirks. Their pitches clash or align, their noise components bloom or fray, suggesting a polyglot choir of small, stubborn voices. Interwoven with this is a public-space activation performed by Yann Leguay in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France, in 2020, where the sounding of whistles folds into the ambient acoustics of the village, its architecture and topography acting as a de facto resonant body.
The fixed piece thus oscillates between controlled recording and contingent event. On one side, there is the deliberate construction of a studio work, where the placement, layering, and dynamic shaping of the whistles can be considered in detail. On the other, there is the unpredictability of a single activation in public space, where echoes, interference, and the presence of others - passersby, birds, traffic, weather - become part of the composition whether invited or not. By binding these two poles together, El Llamado (Der Aufruf) crystallises a central thread in de Vega’s practice: the tension between stability and failure, simulation and exposure. The work asks what it means to “call” in a world saturated with signals, and whether a simple blast of air through a small object can still mark out a fragile zone of attention and relation.
Born in 1979, Mario de Vega moves between Berlin and Mexico City, working as a conceptual artist whose practice cuts across site-specific interventions, sound events, electronic devices, process-oriented projects and sculpture. His pieces often probe thresholds of perception and system behaviour, exploring how structures hold together, how they break down, and how audiences navigate the ambiguity between what they actually hear and what they believe they are hearing. Since 2020 he has also been active as professor for sound art at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, a role that extends his engagement with listening into pedagogy and collective experimentation. In this context, El Llamado (Der Aufruf) can be read as both composition and proposition: an invitation to rethink the whistle - a minimal, portable, globally familiar instrument - as a medium for vulnerability, warning, play, and shared acoustic space.
