Guaracha Budots

Guaracha, also known as Zapateo or Aleteo, is an electronic music genre from Medellín, Colombia. The genre has no connection to the traditional Guaracha of Cuba and it originated in the 2010s when Colombian DJs began looking for inspiration within their own culture. This eventually led to taking the festive trumpets, tambora drums and accordions of traditional cumbia arrangements and mixing them into electronic dance music. Meanwhile, at the opposite side of the planet, at the antipode, with Budots the first "Filipino-fied" electronic music emerged, characterized by its heavy use of percussion, hypnotic bass, high-pitched "tiw ti-ti-tiw" whistle hooks, and organic noises that surround the city. For MAGICAL HACKERISM we have brought together Sindicato Virtual de Mods (SVM) with Club Matryoshka (CM) to establish a dialogue and develop a piece together.

With a practice of modifying video games to feel more Colombian, SVM organizes virtual demonstrations and paints virtual graffiti whenever there is a national strike. On the other hand Club Matryoshka has made a name for itself with virtual raves hosted on Minecraft servers, making them more successful than the physical parties which they also organized (before the pandemic). In Guaracha Budots, Colombian and Filipino world builders come together to craft a virtual world for squatting at and occupying virtual demonstrations and raves. The world is being built during the duration of the exhibition, having builders gathering in differente time zones in Manila, Bogota, Berlin and will culminate in a virtual rave on 29/30.10.22.

Club Matryoshka is a Philippines-based but international virtual venue established to enable a diverse and experimental set of artists to perform in a decolonized space that sits outside of western expectations of capitalist structures, heteronormativity, and racial subservience to European ideals. They have hosted a plethora of artists over the last years, such as Giraffage, HD Mirror, Parkgolf, Seiho, StarRo, Mark Redito, Meishi Smile, Gabber Modus Operandi, Hyph11E, Rui Ho, Slikback, Galen Tipton, and many others.

Jorge Juan B. Wieneke Vis a producer, musician, artist, educator and DJ from Manila, Philippines, who has founded several cultural and community platforms including BuwanBuwan (est. 2012), a collective, community and label for hybrid electronic musicians; Cosmic Sonic Arts (est. 2016), a non-traditional electronic music mentorship program and school that focuses on music as a means of self-discovery and meditation;, Manila Community Radio, an independent non-profit  non-commercial internet radio platform “created by the community for the community. His most recent venture is Kindred Music Productions, an all-around audio post-production studio and hybrid music label. Despite a good track record via his participation in Boiler Room Manila in 2017 and the Redbull Music Academy 2018 in Berlin as well as numerous releases, residencies, collaborations and releases on various labels through the years (Maltine Records, Zoom Lens, Darker Than Wax, Eastern Margins, Tropical Diskoral, Botanic Records and more), he retired his 11-year-old similarobjects project in 2021, to make way for a new journey of sonic self-discovery leaning on a more primal, intuitive yet unapologetic experimental sound which he is currently cultivating.

Sindicato Mods(or The Virtual Union of Mods) traces the forms of cooperativism and social struggle in today’s era of digital capitalism. It is a virtual association that seeks to collect and archive the symbolic visual production of the gamer collective (modifications or mods), especially that related to the working class, identity policies and class struggle, as well as to address the crisis of joining trade unions and cooperatives from a place of leisure and virtuality. It compiles the virtual work that players do by replacing virtuality with fragments of their own realities: buses, precarious jobs, protests and demonstrations, city streets, etc. The mods are implemented in computer games such as Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, 18 Wheels of Steel or The Sims, among others. The project also creates spaces for discussion with the gamer community concerning the new problems of precariousness, representation and the way in which the spirit of association has been transformed.

Guim Camps lives and works in Medellin, Colombia. He is a part time artist, educator, curator and river swimmer.