Sarmen
Almond

The voice can be understood as a concrete form of memory and, like every concrete form, in the impulse of its own expansion, it tends to crack. In the interstices that open within those fissures, Sarmen Almond’s practice unfolds, probing the origin and the becoming of the mystery contained in that oscillatory force that settles into the body through the scream, the babble, the murmur, the spoken word, or the song—and from which we recognize ourselves with astonishment and fascination.

The voice is an instrument of the imagination, and in Sarmen Almond’s work it reveals itself as a territory of experimentation and learning that integrates a creative awareness where different zones of language, thought, emotion, and intuition come in contact. The vibratory nature of these elements constitutes the nodal core of a complex mechanism within a body that projects itself toward perceptual territories, extending the common register of the sensory.

Sarmen’s interest in orienting her practice toward multiple dimensions of the sonic, vocal, and performative spectrum has led her through a complex formation nourished by studies in ethnology and composition, a specialization in Sonology in The Hague, a master’s degree in Sonic Arts and Interdisciplinarity at Queen’s University in Belfast, studies in Choreographic Theater at Pantheatre in Paris, and certification in specialized studies of the Roy Hart tradition, under the instruction of teachers such as Enrique Pardo, Linda Wise, and Jonathan Hart. The Roy Hart methodology searches for the strongest links between the voice, the body, and the imagination.

In the diversity of voices that traverse Sarmen’s work, one can trace not only a constant restlessness to understand the phenomenology of the voice as a means of accessing the affective and psychosomatic nerve paths that relate us as human beings, but also a clear desire to explore and transgress that nature—placing at the center of her research an intense creative exercise that approaches, with depth, the study of other resonant forces. This becomes evident in her series of transdisciplinary pieces entitled Son Fauces (2024), a progression of solos for voice in interaction with various audiovisual, lighting, and stage media.

Son Fauces explores the relationship between various vertebrate beings, recognizing the intrinsic, interspecies bond that is woven through the mouth, understood as both organ and unfathomable cavity, within whose abyss an immeasurable sea of sonorities and emotions is recreated—transforming the body into a sensitive instrument, an entity open to desire as well as to the overflow of the most subtle recesses of its imagination.

As an inseparable part of the entire transdisciplinary fabric that her work represents, Sarmen independently organizes each year the Alquimia Vocal International Meeting, a space focused on studies of the voice and the body, with emphasis on the Roy Hart methodology and in essential dialogue with other practices of movement, creative listening, and experimental pedagogy. This encounter not only constitutes a unique space for specialized and open training within a complex and diverse cultural context such as Mexico City, it is also a nucleus of collective resonances and intuitions that concentrates essential work aimed at understanding the power of the voice and recognizing—within the very process of its praxis—the roar that is generated within the body and finds meaning outside it, in the subtle resonance that translates, names, and transforms us.

Fernando Vigueras,
born in Mexico City, is a sound artist and composer specializing in experimental practices and creative approaches.