Latest on the blog

Radical Housing and Socially-Engaged Art

Read Now

Joao Orecchia

Countries
First at Khoj
Bio Last Updated

Bio

João Orecchia is an artist and performer who makes things with sound. Sometimes those things sound like music. Sometimes they sound like nothing at all. Through experimentation and improvisation Orecchia investigates the materiality of sound, seeking a balance between computer technology, hand-made electronics and real world sounds such as the human voice and traditional musical instruments. Orecchia performs with his band Motèl Mari which includes Mpumelelo Mcata and Tshepang Ramoba of BLK JKS, as well as improvised music with the likes of Lukas Ligeti, Jill Richards and Joseph Suchy.

 Issues of migration, cultural memory and national identity resonate deeply with Orecchia on many levels and run deep through his ancestry, with his mother and father who immigrated to New York City from Lima, Peru and Rome, Italy respectively. Orecchia states that he felt foreign in his place of birth, but with tenuous connections to his “home” countries through language, culture, stories, extended family scattered across the globe. The feeling of home, or belonging in a physical place, never existed. I am always “from somewhere else”, though that somewhere else is not a place, it is simply “not here”.