Rodrigo Toro Madrid (*1990, Santiago de Chile) is a visual artist based between Basel and Zürich, Switzerland. Since 2012 his artistic practice has been dedicated to the production of sound-kinetic installations and experimental music instruments. He has participated in collective and solo exhibitions

like: «Señales Aleatorias. Chilean sound art retrospective» as part of the international sound art festival TSONAMI (2016); «energ(ética): arte y energía sostenible», Los Heroes monument, curated by Jose Roca & Isaac Dyner. Bogotá, Colombia (2017); Solo exhibition «The Scavenger» in FLORA ars+natura. Bogotá, Colombia (2018) and in 2019 at Ausstellungsraum Klingental Basel in the show «Within Others Sounds». He participated in contemporary art contests, where he won the international call for the «Origin & Myth» international exhibition at Melbourne-Clark deck, as part of SACO contemporary arts festival, Antofagasta, Chile (2018); «Premios Municipales de Arte Joven» Posada del Corregidor gallery. First prize Sound Art category (2015), «Concurso Artespacio BBVA» Artespacio gallery, Santiago, Chile (2018). He was a resident at FLORA ars+natura (2017), the Andreas Züst Bibliothek (2020) and Sasso Residency (2022).

“In the last years my artistic practice often started with a walk along the borders of urban spaces - some of them with an industrial past - collecting waste material from where all kind of technological articles are disposed: computer parts, printers, telephones, furniture, kitchen ware, bicycles, etc. What at first was only a strategy to get materials to work with, it became a form to imagine and create «portraits» of desolated spaces, through the exhibition and intervention of their waste. I am generally interested in the deficency, the transformation or the loss which is occurring in the manual appropriation of technology.

Since I started my artistic practice, I’ve built several interventions transforming the collected items in hybrids between kinetic sculpture and musical instruments, relating the sound distortion from these instruments with a phantasmagorical howl of abandoned places. The way I work is based on the modification of circuits and mechanisms, adapting the logic of intervention and decontextualization of objects into something closer to technological «hacking» and the «DIY» culture.

Currently I'm working mainly with antique processes to capture, record and reproduce sound, exploring historical references and connecting them with present concerns about technological development. I try to provide my vision from a context where the cycle of consumption and disposal of technology has reached the level of a crisis.”

Photo Credits:

Photo 1: Nina Rieben
Photo 2: Regula Bearth
Photo 3: Cedric Mussano