• João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga +

    Artist, Composer, South Africa

    João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga is a Peruvian Italian Brooklyn-born Johannesburg based artist, composer, and maker of physical and virtual "things" that play with reality by deconstructing it, shifting expectations of standard uses or purposes of objects and processes. Through experimentation and improvisation he explores sound’s connective capacities through both its physical properties and material preconscious properties, seeking a balance between computer technology, hand-made electronics, and real world sounds like the human voice, field recordings, and traditional musical instruments. João's background as a self-taught musician is in improvised performance and composition for video art, film, and theatre. His practice extends to public performance and intervention and his recently completed master’s degree in Digital Arts brought a shift towards a more spatial and physical approach to composition, where sound, vibration, space, music, and audience become connected in experience. Orecchia has released several recordings, has received a South African Film & Television Award for sound design and has published in the Leonardo Music Journal and the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies.

    Learn more: www.joaoorecchia.com

  • Lindiwe Matshikiza +

    Artist, South Africa

    Lindiwe Matshikiza is a Johannesburg-based artist with a background in theatre-making. She works as a writer, performer, director and voice artist in a variety of contexts such as visual arts projects, public performances, stage plays, film, and other media. Her approach is predominantly collaborative, exploratory, process-based, and cross-disciplinary, and her projects often take on more than one form over time. Her recent work includes long term projects such as the play/film Desert, experimental documentary and life-writing work with Grace Mothiba Bapela—One Take Grace—and her performance and collusion in the partly fictional, metatextual project Film Festival Film which recently premiered at the 69th Berlinale. Lindiwe is also a trained ecdysiast, performing as The Secret Life of Plants.

    Learn more: www.lindiwematshikiza.com

Sex With Demons

Sex With Demons was a project that combines performance, storytelling, and music. The working title is taken from the belief that lucid dreaming can lead to a loss of control over one's sexual encounters in the spiritual realm. Intrigued by the imaginative implications of this idea, and relating it to a certain kind of inherent human vulnerability and fear, the piece explores several notions concerning metaphysical boundaries and what there might be to gain or lose by crossing them. The two artists are experimenting with a form that encompasses and pushes against their respective disciplines. Lindiwe comes from theatre and performance art, while João is at home in the realms of sound art and music. Looking to strengthen their own practices by pushing outside of their usual boundaries, the piece is a reflection of different approaches and styles rubbing up against each other with as yet unknown results. Using the minefield of religious and moral norms and taboos as a starting point, and exploring the fragility and vulnerability of bodies and minds attempting to unlearn these fictions, the duo attempts to narrate and embody the tenuous connections between bodies, between each other, with an audience, between human beings and the elusive Something Bigger.

Having spent some initial time developing creative texts and musical compositions prior to the residency period, Lindiwe and João aimed to develop work that would ultimately be performed in a form or forms that emerge from the process. The texts are by turns poetic, fragmented, anecdotal pieces drawn from dreams, memories, personal accounts of strange events, and extracts from self-help videos from the Internet. Musically, the piece incorporates new and experimental compositions, modular synthesisers, 70s rock 'n roll covers and iconic avant garde "process music". By devising performance tasks for one another and exploring the boundaries between their combined disciplines, the two collaborators were looking to find a new way of working, one that reflects the moment of transition that they each find themselves in as artists. 

Lindiwe and João were in residence at the Camargo Foundation in 2019, as part of the Core Program.