João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga
João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga is a Peruvian Italian Brooklyn-born artist, composer and maker of physical and virtual “things” that play with reality by deconstructing it, shifting expectations of standard uses or purposes of objects and processes. hrough experimentation and improvisation Orecchia explores sound’s connective capacities through both its physical properties and material preconscious properties, seeking a balance between computer technology, hand-made electronics and real world sounds like the human voice, field recordings and traditional musical instruments. Orecchia’s background as a self-taught musician is in improvised performance and composition for video art, film and theatre. His practice extends to public performance and intervention and his recently completed master’s degree in Digital Arts brought a shift towards a more spatial and physical approach to composition, where sound, vibration, space, music and audience become connected in experience.
João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, musician and sound designer whose work spans immersive installation, sound art, contemporary composition, improvisation, electroacoustic composition, printmaking, composition for film and theatre and interdisciplinary site-specific intervention.
Orecchia works extensively with themes of identity and belonging, the subjective nature of reality, anti-hierarchical systems, and alternative value systems.
Born in Brooklyn, NY to a Peruvian mother and an Italian father, he grew up in the city’s mixed immigrant communities, in all their contradictory beauty, displacement and unsettledness. With a strong connection to an elusive somewhere else, Orecchia has always been drawn towards unfamiliar territory.
In 2005, Orecchia relocated to Johannesburg. Plugging into the underground music and visual arts scenes, the city provided an endless source of inspiration and wonderful confusion. Orecchia carved a unique space for himself that sits comfortably between these seemingly incongruous spaces, working with Afrorock group BLK JKS, Thandiswa Mazwai, classical and new music pianist Jill Richards and Lukas Ligeti to name a few as well as world renowned visual artists such as William Kentridge and Kudzanai Chiurai.
While living in Johannesburg, Orecchia completed a master's degree in digital arts, which led him to an increasing interest in the nature of sound itself, how sound acts in space and how bodies are affected by the movement and vibration of sound. His installations seek to uncover the relationships between individual sounds in movement and observe their interaction.
This carries over into his musical work where he composes for unusual ensembles, collaborates with improvising musicians and composes and performs solo works for his current instrumental obsessions, the bass clarinet and the modular synthesiser.
Orecchia has received a South African Film & Television Award for sound design and has published in the Leonardo Music Journal and the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. He taught sound design for four years at the Film and Television department of the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
He is currently based in Marseille, France.
The first project João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga did with David Krut Projects (DKP) was a performance at its Parkwood location in 2011. He was joined by German musician Joseph Suchy to combine for Intermittent. Many years later, in 2019, Orecchia collaborated with David Krut Workshop (DKW) to produce a body of work visually exploring sound and music, resulting in his first solo exhibition, Instruction, which was accompanied by performances and a children’s workshop.
