#Taboo

2017/2025 · Artistic research / composition

#Taboo investigates sexual harassment and the ways in which gender-based violence becomes embedded in everyday life. The project began with the question of how personal testimonies shared online could be transformed into a musical and visual experience, and developed through two different versions of the work over several years.

Starting point

I began working on #Taboo in 2017, with the intention of creating a piece about sexual harassment in Latin America.

Harassment and micromachismo are deeply embedded in everyday life in many parts of Latin America. For me, this became particularly visible after moving from Mexico to the Netherlands. Experiences that I had previously considered normal suddenly became more apparent through the contrast between the two contexts.

Even seemingly ordinary decisions, such as what to wear or how to travel home, had often been shaped by an underlying awareness of safety. I would consider how late I would be returning, whether I would be travelling by car or public transport, and what I was wearing. In the Netherlands, I became aware that many of these calculations had become less present in my everyday life.

This realisation led me to think about how deeply harassment and the anticipation of harassment can become internalised.

#MiPrimerAcoso

The initial research material came from a large social-media conversation that took place in 2016.

Colombian and Mexican journalists called on women to share the first time they had experienced sexual harassment, using the hashtag #MiPrimerAcoso (“My First Harassment”). The hashtag went viral and was used more than 100,000 times.

I became interested in these short testimonies as a form of collective archive. Each tweet described an individual experience, but together they revealed the scale and normalisation of harassment.

I wanted to explore what would happen if these testimonies were taken out of the context of social media and transformed into a musical and visual space.

First version — 2017

The first version of #Taboo was approximately 12 minutes long and was written for two close collaborators: a viola de gamba player and a percussionist.

The instrumentation itself became part of the conceptual framework. I was interested in the contrast between a male instrumentalist and a female performer while working with material about gendered experiences of harassment.

The score was deliberately open. Rather than prescribing every musical action, I developed a flexible framework and worked closely with the performers to determine how the material could be realised.

The piece was performed a few times in the Netherlands in 2017. After these performances, the project remained dormant for several years.

Revisiting the work

In 2025, I was invited to participate in FemFest in Rotterdam, with this edition of the festival focusing on gender-based violence. This provided an opportunity to return to #Taboo and reconsider the work from the perspective of what had changed—both in my own practice and in the context surrounding the piece.

Rather than simply reproducing the original composition, I decided to rework the material completely, retaining the original research archive of tweets while creating a new musical, visual and spatial structure.

The new version expanded the duration to approximately 25 minutes and was written for four female performers.

From individual testimony to collective voice

One of the major changes was the way the performers interacted with the testimonies.

Each of the four performers was assigned a series of tweets. They read the testimonies aloud before performing the musical material associated with them.

I also invited each performer to contribute their own experience of their first encounter with sexual harassment. These personal accounts became part of the piece alongside the original #MiPrimerAcoso testimonies.

This changed the relationship between the historical research material and the performers. The performers were no longer simply interpreting someone else's stories; their own experiences became part of the work.

The rehearsal process therefore required more than musical preparation. We spent considerable time talking, contextualising the material and establishing a sense of trust in which personal experiences could be shared safely.

Increasing intensity: structure

Each tweet is associated with its own chord. When a performer reads a tweet, the quartet responds with its corresponding musical material.

The performers have considerable freedom in how they realise the material, apart from the specified pitches. They respond to one another, to the spoken testimonies and to the emotional and informational weight of what they have just heard.

The structure gradually accelerates.

At the beginning of the piece, the testimonies are separated by relatively long periods of musical space. As the work progresses, the tweets begin to arrive more frequently. The musical material becomes increasingly complex, while the amount of time available to read and absorb each testimony decreases.

This creates a gradual accumulation of voices and experiences.

The reduction of the space between testimonies also changes the performers' relationship to the words. As the pace increases, there is less time to process each individual story before another one arrives.

The musical structure therefore reflects the overwhelming accumulation of experiences of harassment: individual stories begin to form a collective body of testimony.

Space as part of the research

The physical space of the new performance also became an important part of the reworking process.

The piece was performed in a large black-box space adjacent to WORM in Rotterdam. I wanted the audience to occupy the centre of the space, with the four performers surrounding them.

The tweets were projected onto at least two walls, allowing the audience to encounter the testimonies from different perspectives. The original Spanish texts appeared alongside English translations.

This created a situation in which the audience could simultaneously hear and read the testimonies, while being physically surrounded by the performers.

The spatial arrangement reinforced the idea that harassment is not an isolated experience but something that surrounds and permeates everyday life.

Research through collaboration

The new version was created with four performers from different generations and national backgrounds: a violinist, recorder player, electronic musician and singer.

Working with the performers became an important part of the research. Because the material deals with personal experiences of harassment and violence, rehearsals needed to function as a space of trust as well as a space for musical experimentation.

We spent time discussing the context of the testimonies, sharing perspectives and testing different ways of speaking and performing the material.

The collaborative process allowed the piece to become more personal than the original version. The performers' own experiences became part of the work, while their different musical backgrounds influenced how the material could be articulated.

From documentation to collective experience

The two versions of #Taboo are separated by several years, but they are connected by the same archive of testimonies.

The first version focused on transforming social-media testimony into a video and musical composition. The revisited version expands this into a more embodied and collective experience, bringing together recorded testimonies, live voices, personal stories, musical response and spatial relationships.

The work remains deliberately intense. Twenty-five minutes of listening to experiences of sexual harassment and violence is difficult, and I wanted the piece to retain that discomfort rather than offering an easy resolution.

At the end, however, the performers come together in speech. They say the words:

“We are no longer afraid. Now we have each other.”

The ending shifts the focus from individual experiences of violence towards solidarity and collective resistance.

For me, revisiting #Taboo also became a reflection on how artistic research can remain active over time. The original questions did not disappear after the first version of the piece. Returning to the same material years later allowed me to reconsider it through a different artistic language, a different group of performers and a different understanding of my own relationship to the subject.

The piece became not only a work about harassment, but also an investigation into how testimony can be transformed into collective artistic experience, and how a composition can create a space for listening, recognition and solidarity.