Paula Montecinos – Break The Algorithm

During their three-month residency as part of WORM x Amarte, Paula Montecinos and Megan Hoegter have been further developing Sonic Feminist Fabulations—an experimental online radio format. Blending radiophonic art with participatory sonic performance, the project delves into themes of displacement, diasporic memories, and collective connection through sound, voice, and silence. Grounded in feminist and anti-colonial perspectives, it amplifies marginalised voices in sound art.

The final outcomes of their residency will be presented on December 13 at the Break The Algorithm event, showcasing all projects from WORM x Amarte. In this interview, we speak with Paula Montecinos about her collective, their creative process, and the ideas behind Sonic Feminist Fabulations.

What inspired the creation of the Sonic Feminist Fabulation, and mixing all these fields together?

Sonic Feminist Fabulation emerged from a process in which I was already engaged. For me, it really started to shape during the pandemic. At that time, I was doing my master’s in choreography, and, due to restrictions, live performances with an audience in the room weren’t possible. Everything was video-streamed, but the video didn’t make sense for me because I was doing a sonic performance. I decided to experiment with radio broadcasting instead. That was my first real experience with radio broadcasting – connecting geography with sonic space.

So, I was already experimenting with a radio broadcast in some sound performative context. In that time, I began to understand what radio – as a medium – could offer in terms of creating connection across spaces, contexts, and temporalities. Radio is a technology that belongs to a specific moment in time and history. I started exploring how it could create a sense of a connection across different geographies and geopolitical contexts. This idea of connecting with an invisible listener – someone that you cannot see but who is present – really captured my imagination. There, in the radio broadcast, was for a speculative or fabulative space into which the body extends and reaches out. That’s where the concept of sonic imagination or the “sonic fabulation” came as a way of reshaping space, time, relationships and stories.

Later, in 2023, during a residency at Transmediale in Berlin, I began delving deeper into specifics regarding the framework of Sonic Feminist Fabulation. I started asking questions like: Why is this feminist? What makes it fabulative? There is a techno-feminist ethos underlying the project. It prioritises access to technology and creating collective spaces for learning and transmission. This isn’t about a consumerist or extractivist approach to technology, where you simply buy a device and use it. It’s about engaging deeply with processes, understanding, crafting, and customising devices. The DIY approach is central. It’s about amplifying non-consumerist narratives and methods, and also about giving space to people behind the mediums. The invitation is extended to guests working in radio already and to other contributors, focusing on femme, female, non-binary, and intersex artists. Music and sound spaces are often dominated by male voices, so this project intentionally creates room to listen to and highlight those other perspectives and experiences. 

And when did Megan join you in the project?

The collaboration with Megan began much earlier as a connection between an artist and curator. She invited me to perform in the opening program for The Whole Life. Archives and Imaginaries congress at the House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin in March 2022. From there, we continued a conversation around the politics of the sonic – what sound means in terms of noise, audibility, and the stakes involved when sound becomes more of an experience rather than a conventional format.
Our discussions expanded into exploring the body politics of sound. Together, we began researching a shared significant reference, which is the radio work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin. In the years around 1927 (so, during the rise of fascism in Germany and Europe), he created a series of radio shows aimed at anti-fascist education, including programs for children. This is still one of Benjamin’s lesser-known frameworks. Learning about this part of his practice and thinking about it in relation to Latin American discussions of Benjamin’s work during and after the period of the dictatorships was pivotal for us. Even in those early stages of radio, Benjamin was already conceptualising and theorising critical approaches to sound and listening as tools for fostering critical pedagogy. Megan became my most active collaborator, contributing to the conceptualization of critical approaches to radio today and within the framework of Sonic Feminist Fabulation. Together, we’ve explored how sound can engage with history, politics, and pedagogy in transformative ways.

You mentioned before different forms of sound, and in the description of the project you mentioned silence as one of the means of communication. How do you approach silence in the context of a feminist sound art?

There are many layers to silence that came up during the research. It’s not just the absence of sound or information. Silence itself is a carrier of information. When we perceive silence, it’s important to ask: What has been silenced? Who chose to be silent? For which reasons? Is it for survival? Out of fear? What are the possibilities that silence carries?

From a feminist perspective, I approach silence by exploring its qualities. These questions help us understand the dynamics of power. Silence can reveal how power operates – how words, for example, can silence other voices or feelings within us. Silence isn’t inherently about oppression. Sometimes, it’s a choice for survival or a conscious decision to tune in to your surroundings, to connect with something that requires a quieter state. Silence can be both beautiful and complex.

I don’t think of silence as inherently good or bad. It depends entirely on the context in which it arises and how it’s experienced. Silence can even be loud, almost like noise, depending on how it’s perceived.

There are many factors shaping the context. When I asked you about the silence, at first I was thinking through the lens of the situation of women in Afghanistan and the oppression there. But after your explanation, I can see that it can also be a conscious decision, a way of communication in itself.

I completely understand. If we were to divide it into two broad categories, there’s definitely the kind of silence that needs to be broken. I know it pretty well from South America, particularly in relation to femicide and the politics of  gender oppression. Silence is something that you want to break. You yell, you go to the manifestations, you meet your people, you make all the noise, you break the silence, and you are very present there. In this situation, you engage with silence as an accomplice of terror.

At the same time, there’s another side to it. Silence is also about tuning in to  yourself, to the people around you, or to the environment. Silence, in this sense, becomes a tool for connection, reflection, and presence. And from one to the other, we have such a wide spectrum in the ways in which silence appears, right?

We talked about the sonic and the silence. What role does gender play in these sonic landscapes? What maybe you would like the listeners to experience in general?

The biggest aim is to centre the experience of a femme, female, non-binary and intersex artists who, in different ways, engage with anti-colonial approaches to feminism. From there, we create a critical space for feeling and for examining the sonic realm through listening practices that emphasise non-linear approaches to narrative-making and to narrating experience. All of these spaces include moments of silence, which can be uneasy or difficult to speak about. These are not areas where a clear answer exists, not even feminism is itself a project that is complete. It has a lot of failure within it. It’s incomplete.

We work with the idea of feminism not as a solution that gives us lasting peace, but as a grounding principle and a glimpse into potential futures—futures where anti-colonial feminist practices can take up more space and have a more active role in shaping governance and societal structures. We don’t yet know exactly how these futures will take shape or how they will be experienced. But we speculate and engage in research, creating spaces to ask these questions and share experiences. The process itself becomes a framework for imagining possibilities, depending on who’s involved in asking and listening.

So it’s a work in progress?

Yes, absolutely. What we are presenting as a radio work at WORM in December is one episode from within a much longer-term project. Sonic Feminist Fabulation is a research framework for sound and fabulative approaches, and it’s an exploration of experimental radio. Episode #1 sits within that.

The listener is invited to engage with it in a way that goes beyond simply consuming content, whether that’s a soundtrack, a sound production, or even an interview or conversation. Instead, it’s about questioning the modalities of listening itself – how it connects to the body, to experience, and to reflection. It’s also an invitation to ask yourself questions: Why are you listening? Or, what is your relationship to what you’re hearing? We emphasise a non-linear, embodied approach to sound.

At the same time, it’s a process we’re still figuring out. We’ve just had Episode #0 in October 2024, which will be shared in part during radio broadcasts leading up to our performance here in December, and we’ll continue with episodes after this. With each episode, we gain a little more insight into what this project is doing, can do, and where it could be heading. It’s very much experimental in that sense.

Are you excited about the collaboration with WORM?

Oh, it’s fantastic! What’s coming now is a really exciting opportunity to re-imagine the radio booth at WORM as a performative space. The booth is not typically used for movement or physical performance, and we’re working on shifting the structure a bit, with the support of the team. A big part of this is also thinking about how listeners will engage with us. The goal is to create a participatory, experiential mode of listening. The stream itself becomes a way of connecting the different “heres” and “theres” of sonic experience, blurring the boundaries between the performance happening in the booth and listeners’ experiences elsewhere.

What are the three sounds that define your project?

The first is the sound of electromagnetic field amplifiers, created using various antennas and other devices. These capture the small noises of the electromagnetic landscape, forming an integral part of the soundscape.

The second is more speculative: voices that aren’t immediately recognizable or even audible yet. These could be imagined sounds – frequencies or fragments from conversations I’ve had with collaborators like Megan or others. They might live in memory or imagination, making them a kind of silent sound that exists in the archive until a future moment when they may be heard.

The third is low-frequency oscillators. Most of these are DIY devices or gifts, and they play a crucial role in creating a tactile listening experience. Low frequencies often don’t translate well through streaming, so when working on-site, I use subwoofers to connect the listeners’ bodies to the movement of the waves. This duality between remote and on-site listening –each with its unique sound arrangements – is central to the experimental nature of the project.

How do you envision the project ending in the future?

I see the project evolving rather than having a defined ending. One key idea that emerged from conversations with Megan and others is a rethinking of the roles of guest and host—how could a guest become a host, or how might collaborators take on the role of hosting episodes in their spaces?

The project resonates deeply with diverse socio-political contexts, and I hope to stretch it geographically to outside of the Netherlands and Europe as well. Being from Chile, I would love to create an episode there, especially in the southern territories like Temuco, where I’m from. While this project was initially shaped by my migration to the Netherlands, this place doesn’t feel like a place of belonging for me. The idea of diasporic and displaced memories is central, and I want to bring these into the project’s trajectory.

In the long term, I imagine the project becoming more dynamic, incorporating sounds and stories from specific localities. This would involve shifting roles and locations, with broadcasts in outdoor spaces tied to environmental and political issues in a global context. This would be a really nurturing experience for me.

What are algorithms to you?

Our approach to algorithms is not focused on the current AI trends, or even to common understanding of them. We see algorithmic thinking as an ancient technology that has existed for centuries. So it doesn’t necessarily involve machine learning. In our case, we are approaching algorithmic thinking from the perspective of the tarot. I’ve personally been a practitioner of tarot for around twenty years now. It’s a reading technology that can approach, anticipate and decipher what could be the influences of the past on the present and future.

Tarot offers a way to predict and interpret patterns, and we are connecting this idea to algorithmic poetry, especially in the context of the political crises of our time. We explore how tarot can help ask questions related to anti-colonial governance or practice and how to approach times of a crisis and collapse of the structures. What is it about the cycles of renewal and catastrophes, for example? I don’t think that it’s possible to have an anti-colonial agenda where you are behaving as a colonialist yourself, right?

Follow the collective on their Instagram here
personal socials Paula Montecinos and Megan Hoegter

Interview by Kacper Nożewski
Photos by Thomas Lenden