menos que nada (2025)
m e n o s q u e n a d a (less than nothing) is a meditation on absence.
After reading Cristina Rivera Garza’s essay On 2501 Migrants by Alejandro Santiago, I turned to my accordion to explore how sound might express the lingering presence of what is no longer here.
The piece was shaped by Santiago’s installation of 2,501 life-sized clay sculptures. Each figure stands in place of someone who left his village in Oaxaca, Mexico. When Santiago returned home after years abroad, he found it transformed: empty houses, silent streets. His response was to symbolically repopulate the space, giving form to the departed. The sculptures bear cracks, textures, and marks—traces of the people they represent.
My piece extends this meditation on absence in different forms: the emptiness left behind by those who migrate, the loss of those who are gone forever, and the spaces that continue to hold their memory. As someone who has lived far from home, I’ve felt the lifelessness of places once full, now quiet—where presence lingers only in memory.
The title, menos que nada, reflects how absence is not silent, but loud—how what is no longer here can take up space in everyday life. It is a silence that speaks, one that grows louder than sound.
This piece lives with that silence. It does not try to resolve it. Instead, it honors it. It traces how loss, even when invisible, continues to shape us—how absence can become a repository of memory, and how that memory, in turn, becomes a presence.