“The rivers have music, the stones have music, the wind has music. Everything in the world sings, and those who know how to listen understand that the voice of the earth is one—a melody that connects us to the trees, the mountains, and the birds.”

— José María Arguedas

The first edition of the Sacred Valley Triennial opens with the proposal The Valley Listens.

Here, listening is understood as a form of attentiveness toward the territory and the many forms of life that inhabit it. It involves returning to the sounds of the landscape, the resonances of memory, and the vibrations that move through the environment.

In this sense, listening is understood both as a form of presence and as a way of life.

Throughout the Triennial, a series of sound projects will explore different approaches to sound—from musical practices and field recordings to research into the territory’s instruments, materials, and acoustic processes.

These projects mark the beginning of a research process that will continue over the following years through residencies, workshops, and gatherings.

Through listening, the Triennial proposes a way of sensing and transmitting life.

The project will unfold over two months through a series of broadcasts on Radio Pitusiray Calca 103.3 FM  and  https://www.mixcloud.com/trienalvallesagrado/ 

Each session offers a distinct approach to sound as a medium for artistic creation, shaping an ongoing process that develops over time.

The project is also conceived as a recognition of local radio stations, understood as essential spaces of listening, memory, and transmission within the territory.

ARTISTS

The Triennial brings together artists whose practices emerge from Peru’s coast, highlands, and rainforest, as well as from diverse international contexts, creating a dialogue between territories and different ways of listening.

Naid Cruz

Naid Cruz is a film composer, sound artist, and noise enthusiast from Cusco, currently based in Los Angeles. Her career combines professional audio production with a strong academic background. Focusing on the evolution of electronic music, she uses technology to sculpt soundscapes.

Nahun Saldaña

Nahun Saldaña is a Peruvian designer, researcher, and sound artist. His work has been presented at international sound art institutions and festivals.

His practice lies at the intersection of soundscape, ecology, and acoustic experimentation, exploring sound as a space of connection between the human, the natural, and the political.

He is currently researching the relationships between voice, territory, and climate change from a critical and sensory perspective.

Elena Rivoltini

Elena Rivoltini is a performer, sound artist, and curator. Her research focuses on voice, archives, and more-than-human ecologies. Her practice brings together writing, sound, ritual, performance, and modes of listening, combining critical reflection with embodied methodologies.

She is the founder of Archive of Voices and curator of CASASTUDIO. She has collaborated with the Venice Biennale Musica and Biennale Teatro, Triennale Milano, APL Vienna, Threes Productions, NERO Editions, and Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles.

Carlos Chevez Hernández

Carlos Chevez Hernández is an Afro-Peruvian singer-songwriter and producer. During his time at Kai Residency, he created the albums Camino a la Libertad and Monteagudo 1825, released in 2023 and 2024 respectively, as well as the songbook KAI (2021–2025).

Manuel Alvarez

Manuel Alvarez is a Peruvian sound artist, producer, researcher, and engineer. Through his projects Nash Equilibrium and Latam 3000, he explores the intersection of Latin American rhythms, ritualism, electronic music, digital culture, and emerging technologies, moving between ambient, future bass, and deconstructed club music. He is the founder and co-director of Laboratorio, a platform dedicated to fostering dialogue between art and technology, and is a member of the Discos Graves collective.

Louis Schofield

Louis Schofield, also known as Par Aaq, is a music producer and composer. His music fuses rhythms and sounds from different parts of Peru and the world, moving across genres such as rock, funk, jazz, and Afrobeat.

Nelson Márquez

Nelson Márquez is a sound designer, producer, and composer (ACM, UK) with twenty years of professional experience. Currently based in the Sacred Valley, his research focuses on immersive acoustic environments and spatial-audio technologies, specializing in surround-sound formats and ambisonic systems.

Carlos Garavito Herrera

Carlos Garavito Herrera is an artist with twenty-six years of experience in photography, video art, and video installations, whose current practice focuses on sound experimentation.

He is the founder and director of Kai Residency in the Sacred Valley, a project he has led for thirteen years as part of his more than sixteen years of cultural project management in the region.

Gladys Conde

Gladys Conde is a composer and performer of ritual songs and songs rooted in family upbringing, created for stage productions and film.

Her extensive body of work includes Zorrito Ramón (2011), Lliqlla: El canto de la abuela (2020), Niños del Sol (2022), the musical oracle Santa Tierra: Para la salud planetaria (2024), and the forthcoming Vuelo de Katari.

She is also the director of socio-environmental projects such as Niños del Sol.

T◬Ҡ◬U (aka t4k4u, TAKAU)

T◬Ҡ◬U is a musician whose works are based on mysterious and intriguing electronic configurations, generating mistaken, mystical, and speculative interpretations of a hypothetical posthuman Peruvian folk music.

Canto Villano

For the past decade, Canto V. Engelhard has created sound rituals that travel from their native Lima to cities, towns, and sacred places. Guided by water as a teacher, they weave sounds from their diasporic body that honor the histories of the territories they inhabit.

These recording ceremonies culminate in soundscapes that guide songs conceived as dissident prayers, harmonized through percussion with stones, rattles, flutes, keyboards, pututo, and shofar.

As a musician, they participate in sound-healing and experimental-music projects, including Resonancia Menguante with Dimitri Manga and Orieta Chrem, Y No with Raimundo Atal and Julia Santoli, and Siestaaa with Jean-Carla Rodea and Ana Rivera Uribe.

They have exhibited soundscape installations at Xapiri Ground in Cusco; the Museo de Arte de Lima, Centro Cultural de España, and Galería Livia Benavides in Lima; RGR Gallery in Mexico City; and Works on Water in New York.

In 2023, they produced the field recordings and sound design for the Peruvian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, representing the community-based educational organization Waman Wasi.

Marco Valdivia

Marco Valdivia develops an ongoing sound composition translated into code, endowed with the capacity to learn, create, and transform.

Juan Barreto

Active since the late 1990s, Juan Barreto’s Rapapay project draws inspiration from Peru’s cultural richness and diversity, connecting IDM and ambient music with folk traditions.

Based in the Santa Eulalia Valley, his current sound is entirely analog and performed live using self-built modular synthesizers. He is the creator of the albums Aymaraes (2003), Ccora, and Uku Pacha, co-creator of the @BQestia SoundSystem, and founder of Cretásico.

Orieta Chrem, aka Oriqi, is a sound-based vibrational therapist, sound engineer, music producer, DJ, and architect. During her sound engineering studies in Barcelona, she began researching the effects of sound on the human body.

She studied Biosonics to deepen her knowledge of quartz crystal singing bowls and trained with renowned gong master Vikrampal. She is also certified as a Biofield Tuning practitioner through Eileen Day McKusick’s specialized training program.

Her current sessions combine all these areas of knowledge, creating her own unique alchemy and offering an immersive sonic experience that supports mental, physical, and emotional health and well-being.

Rafo Nunjar 

A self-taught musician, composer, sound researcher, and instrument maker, his work explores Peru’s traditional music and the relationship between sound, territory, and memory. In 2024, he released Rupestre, his first studio album. He is the founder of the Paccha Museum of Traditional Instruments and a founding member of Kukuy, an association dedicated to preserving the traditional songs of Cusco.

Piero Tisoc 

Is a Cusco-born musician and researcher. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music, specializing in Piano, from the Leandro Alviña Miranda Public School of Advanced Artistic Education in Cusco. He also completed a Diploma in Music Production at Instituto Terciario TAMABA in Argentina and earned a Master’s degree in Music Research from the International University of La Rioja in Spain.

He was awarded a scholarship by Berklee College of Music to study in Boston, United States, alongside renowned musician and educator Victor Wooten.

His professional practice encompasses performance as a multi-instrumentalist, composition, arranging, and music production. He has developed and collaborated on a wide range of regional, national, and international artistic projects, participating in recording productions, festivals, concerts, and interdisciplinary initiatives that bring together music, dance, film, and theater.

Andrea Rejas

Andrea Rejas is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural manager based in the Sacred Valley. Her practice explores the intersections between the body, nature, and writing through different forms of expression. She is the author of Cubiertas de selva, a book of poetry and photography that weaves together the intimate, the botanical, and the sensory. Her work moves across writing, photography, sculpture, video poetry, and sound. A Time That Touches Us expands the universe of the book into the realm of listening through a new sonic passage.

Evgeny Shumlyansky

Evgeny Shumlyansky  is a Russian-born pianist, composer and cultural entrepreneur based for the past five years in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Peru. He creates improvised piano and electronic music, and founded Hidden Stars of Orion, a project in which he sings in Quechua, drawing on Andean cosmology. His latest work, El Quinto Sol: sacrificio y movida, is a contemporary sonic ritual. He is also the founder of DOM Perú, a cultural and art space in Písac.

Julio Lugon

Julio Lugon is an interdisciplinary artist working across sound art, installation, performance, electronics, and visual arts. His practice explores the relationship between nature, technology, and culture, incorporating plants and other non-human beings. He holds a master’s degree in Sound Studies from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and received first prize at Bonn Hoeren – Sonotopia 2019. His work has been presented across Europe, South America, and Asia. He is also an experimental musician and DJ under the alias Pira Lemú and hosts Radio Jurassic Park.

Nicolas Kouri (Lima, 1996)

Nicolas Kouri is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the relationships between territory, nature, geometry, and consciousness from the heart.

His work weaves together contemporary and ancestral languages to imagine new forms of interconnection among beings, centered on unity consciousness and multidimensionality.

Juan Daniel Padilla Benavente
(Cusco, 1993)

Musician, researcher, and educator. He holds a degree in Music from the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences (UPC) and a master’s degree in Musicology from Newman Graduate School. He has also pursued postgraduate studies in Social Anthropology. He teaches guitar, specializing in the Suzuki method, and produces the Cusco popular music ensemble María Angola. His research focuses on Cusco music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, musical indigenismo, and the processes through which sound identity is constructed in the Andes.u.

Days: Monday to Friday
Time: 6:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.
Radio Pitusiray: Calca, 103.3 FM
Online: https://www.mixcloud.com/trienalvallesagrado/

Monday, September 14
Presentation of the Sacred Valley Triennial 2026: The Valley Listens

Tuesday, September 15
Gladys Conde
Work: Voices to Inhabit the Earth

Wednesday, September 16
Valicha Evans
Work: Ancestors

Thursday, September 17
Mora Malbran
Ancient Quechua Songs + Singing Workshop

Friday, September 18
Naid Cruz
Work: Lethargies and Time

THE VALLEY LISTENS

Monday, September 21
Chayo Chévez — Musical Journey

Tuesday, September 22
Rafo Nunjar — Musical Journey

Wednesday, September 23
Orieta Chrem, aka Oriqi — Sound Healing

Thursday, September 24
Takau — Tribute to the Unknown

Friday, September 25
Canto Villano — Calling for the Good Rains

Program — Week 3
THE VALLEY LISTENS

Monday 28
Piero Tisoc — Dreamlike Revelations

Tuesday 29
Inkariy Museum — Inkariy Museum Sound Archive

Wednesday 30
Louis Schofield — Par Aaq Project

Thursday 1
Juan Barreto Solari (Rapapay) — Rapapay Project

Friday 2
Nahun Saldaña — Sound Map of Arín

SCHEDULE · WEEK 4
THE VALLEY LISTENS

MONDAY 5 Julio Lugon & Nicolás Kouri — Reality Transurfing

TUESDAY 6 Andrea Rejas — A Time That Touches Us

WEDNESDAY 7 Manuel Álvarez — Latam World Map

THURSDAY 8 Elena Rivoltini — Archive of Voices

FRIDAY 9 Evgeny Shumlyansky — Hidden Stars of Orion

SCHEDULE · WEEK 5
THE VALLEY LISTENS

MONDAY 12 

Juan Daniel Padilla

Musical career

TUESDAY 13

 Marco Valdivia

numeral

WEDNESDAY 14 

Nelson Márquez

Musical career

THURSDAY 15 

Takau · Nelson Márquez- rumi data

FRIDAY 16  

carlos garavito h 

Capulí Forest.

PROGRAM · WEEK 6
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24

LISTENING SESSION · 12:00–1:00 PM
Location: Minimarket Llipimpaq