In the Quinta Bella neighborhood of Recoleta, Santiago de Chile, in a now abandoned site where the vegetation spreads freely, rises a water tower with an underground water reservoir at its feet. Witnesses of the history of a neighborhood of proud social struggle, in a district of Communist government, today remain as ruins covered in dust. Its walls crack due to the passage of time and the vegetation that inhabits them.

An underground concrete cylinder, with just two small openings, 5 meters deep, 17 meters in diameter, 9 columns arranged in a perfect 3x3 grid, is now an empty space that for decades housed water. The walls have layers of cracking, dry black mold and two pipes covered in orange rust that once connected to the engine room to pump water from the reservoir to the tower. Using shovels, brooms and buckets we removed layers and layers of dirt, until we reached a solidified limescale. When we poured water, it began to hiss and chirp, drinking desperately, as if for years the reservoir had been waiting for this moment to recover its former function. Inside the cylinder, any sound remains static for several seconds, the bass filling the space like a clamor that passes through our bodies.

The soundtracks presented here are from the beginning and end of the festival "Espacios Resonantes" which took place inside the Underground Water Reservoir. “Sweeping Dust in the Underground Water Reservoir” is from when we cleaned the tank, removing the dirt and dust over several days. One can hear the site’s reverberations while sweeping and shoveling. In “Pouring Water Into the Limescale,” one can hear the sounds of lime bubbles reacting to the water we poured at the end of the festival after two weeks of concerts inside the structure.

Espacios Resonantes (Resonant Spaces) is an artistic research project and a series of artworks developed by Chilean artists, architects, and sound artists Sofía Balbontín and Mathias Klenner that focus on the aesthetic, political, social and acoustic dimension of aural architecture as a means to understand the interactions between architecture, sound, and listening. Taking a critical look at our built environments, especially the ruins of abandoned industrial infrastructures, this project promotes the aesthetic practice of listening and sound creation as transformative means of constructing alternative narratives.