Alejandra Cárdenas (also known as Ale Hop) is a Peruvian-born artist, researcher, and experimental musician based in Berlin. Her body of work includes live shows, record releases, sound and video artworks, research on sound and technology, and original music for film, dance, and theatre projects.

Anticipating her performance at Rewire on 11 April, Cárdenas will unpack tracks from her latest album, A Body Like a Home (2025), in conversation with Giada Dalla Bontà. The two will explore the roles of artistic and personal voices, serving as both witness and confessor in the unfolding autobiographical soundscapes of trauma, recovery, and love that resonate with identitarian narratives, and examine the inevitable loop between personal wounds and collective scars left by historical colonialism in Peru.

The discussion will include excerpts from Cárdenas’s poetry chapbook accompanying the album, inviting the audience to reflect on how writing and composing can become rituals for digging into buried meanings, effectively transforming the body into a living archive of experiences. Oscillating between the intimate and the forensic, poetry and sounding, the discussion will illuminate both the somatic and inherited expressions of trauma, highlighting how the narratives within the album refract across two mediums – where songs give breath to the experiences and poems provide their skeleton.

Giada Dalla Bontà is an Italian researcher, curator, and writer based in Berlin and Copenhagen, exploring the intersections of sound, art, and politics through educational projects, participatory practices, and poetic interventions. A co-founding member of the Listening Biennial, she is also a PhD fellow at the KU Sound Studies Lab, focusing on experimental and unofficial practices in the EECCA region.

The conversation is presented in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Niederlande, as part of their multi-year project on listening.