Repeat their names

Artistic research project · 2021 -2022

Context

Repeat their names was inspired by an event that took place during the International Women's Day protests in Mexico City in March 2021. Ahead of the demonstrations, the Mexican government erected a three-metre-high fence around the National Palace to "protect" the building. Feminist groups transformed those barriers into a memorial by painting on them the names of hundreds of women who had been murdered in Mexico.

The image of thousands of names covering the walls became the starting point for this project. Rather than documenting the protest itself, I wanted to create a sonic version of that memorial: a composition built from the names of murdered and disappeared women in Mexico.

Gathering the names

The first stage of the project was dedicated entirely to collecting names. This became the hardest and most demanding part of the research process, taking approximately 2 months.

The composition is organised in three movements, each requiring a different research methodology.

I. Disappearances

The first movement uses the names of women reported as disappeared in Mexico during 2017.

I worked with Mexico's official public database of disappeared persons, a platform where families can register missing relatives. Although the database is publicly accessible, it is also incomplete and fragmented: databases from different Mexican states do not always communicate with one another, and official records are widely acknowledged to underestimate the scale of disappearances.

After filtering the database, I compiled a list of 997 names, which became the material for the first movement.

II. Feminicidios

Researching the second movement proved considerably more complex.

Official records of feminicide in Mexico capture only a fraction of gender-related killings. Because of this discrepancy, I decided to combine official sources with feminist archives created independently of the state.

A crucial part of the research involved working with Antimonumenta Vivas Nos Queremos, the feminist collective that organised the action of painting names onto the barriers surrounding the National Palace in 2021. The collective shared with me an extensive spreadsheet containing names collected through their own activist work.

At the same time, I worked with the documentation created by María Salguero, whose Mapa de Feminicidios en México maps victims of feminicide across the country and links each name to press reports and public information.

The research became an extensive process of cross-referencing both archives. I compared lists, searched individual names, identified duplicates, and checked incomplete records. Many entries contained only first names or partial information. Rather than excluding uncertain cases, I chose to include them whenever possible. The project was ultimately about the act of naming, and I was unwilling to erase someone because official documentation was incomplete.

The final archive for this movement contains 3,289 names.

III. Resistencia

The third movement originally set out to collect the names of survivors of gender-based violence.

I contacted several feminist organisations hoping to collaborate with women willing to share their stories. Unsurprisingly, many survivors were understandably reluctant to make their names public.

This changed the direction of the movement entirely.

Instead of representing individual survivors, Resistencia became a reflection on collective survival and resistance. The movement is built around voices singing the syllable "tú" ("you" in Spanish), transforming the work from naming individual women into addressing and including every woman.

From archive to instrument

Once the names had been collected, I created a large spreadsheet that eventually extended to around 69 pages of names of victims of femicide and 21 pages of names of disappeared women.

Every name was assigned a pitch. Because I knew from the outset that the work would be created with singer Fernanda Cabral K, I designed the pitch system around her vocal range.

The spreadsheet became a score for recording.

Fernanda spent nearly a week in the studio recording every single name individually:

• 997 names for Disappearances.
• 3,289 names for Feminicidios.

Each name was sung on its assigned pitch, creating thousands of individual audio files.

These recordings became a virtual instrument.

Compositional process

The piece is written for vibraphone and fixed media. The fixed-media part is constructed entirely from the recorded (sung) names.

Importing thousands of recordings into Logic transformed the archive into a compositional environment. At one point, the recordings amounted to nearly 18 hours of continuous names. The challenge became not only musical but computational: building a thirty-minute composition while ensuring that every recorded name was present somewhere within the work.

I developed a visual system inside Logic, organising tracks per pitch, and colour-coding every audio file once it had been used. The remaining grey files became a constant reminder of the names that had not yet entered the piece. I remember reaching a point where the composition was already long, yet hundreds of names still remained unused. The question became: how can every name be heard?

This impossibility shaped the music itself.

Sometimes individual names emerge clearly from the texture. At other moments they dissolve into dense clouds of voices where no single identity can be distinguished. That musical decision mirrors the reality that inspired the project: occasionally one feminicide receives national attention, while many others remain unnamed, unheard, or forgotten. It also represents how somehow, we have normalised gender-based violence, to the point where femicide and disappearances become part of every-day life.

Reflection

The research process was emotionally overwhelming.

Months of reading names, checking records, searching news reports, and listening repeatedly to thousands of voices had a profound effect on me as a composer. Rather than responding with dense or aggressive musical material, I found myself writing music that became increasingly sparse, fragile, and minimal.

Looking back, I think this was a way of making space for the weight carried by the names themselves. The emotional intensity already existed in the material; the music did not need to amplify it.

By the time I reached the third movement, Resistencia, I was exhausted and heartbroken by the research process. The final movement became the shortest and, paradoxically, the most hopeful part of the work. It does not resolve the violence explored in the previous movements, but it gestures towards solidarity, survival, and the possibility of continuing to speak each other's names.

Research materials

• Public database of disappeared persons in Mexico (2017 dataset).
• Mapa de Feminicidios en México by María Salguero.
• Archive shared by Antimonumenta Vivas Nos Queremos.
• Artist-created archive of 4,286 names.
• Vocal recordings by Fernanda Cabral forming the fixed-media instrument.