Kariñitos (porque duele desde el centro de la tierra) is a tender and tremulous homage to Karen Urcia, Mochica healer and cultural activist, whose affective gestures toward the ancestral whistling bottles became the central sonic material that shapes this track. The title—merging cariñitos, meaning gentle caresses, with Karen’s name—evokes a unique mode of touch that resonates far beyond the surface. These caresses, registered during the Resonaciones exhibition process at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart (2023) and ifa Gallery Stuttgart (2024–25), form the emotional and vibrational core of the composition. As Karen’s hands traced the contours of the vessels, the clay beings responded with vibration and memory—sounds captured through contact microphones and other sensors, later entangled with AI reinterpretations that are further arranged with contemporary musical instruments, synthesizers, and vocal sections for the composition. In this piece, affection is inseparable from ache: a resonance that rises from the center of the Earth, where love, loss, territorial and temporal dislocations, long-distance membranes, silence, tectonic plates, loud voids, and tactile listening converge. Emerging through an intricate and collective process, Kariñitos carries infinite reciprocities and a vibration that continues to move outward as a continuous thread between dimensions. These tactile sonic textures question the limits of our skins and the resonant membranes between worlds, temporalities, categories, and logics.
This song is part of Nicole L’Huillier’s forthcoming album Respuestas, which will be out via Buh Records (2025), thanks to the support of ifa Gallery Stuttgart and the Resonaciones exhibition project.

About Respuestas:
Respuestas is a sonic reverberation of the exhibition Resonaciones, emerging from dialogues, experiments, and collective research in a curatorial-artistic interplay. Shaped by interwoven calls and responses, the album traces its origins to the activation of displaced Moche whistling vessels—ancestral Andean technological entities that breathe through water and air— and expand through the evolving soundscape of the exhibition. The echoes of the clay beings, recorded through contact microphones and electromagnetic sensors, become entangled with sounds from planetary tremors, other environmental oscillations, sonic contributions from visitors, and AI-generated transformations and reinterpretations to form an ever-shifting sonic field. Sound here is both an open archive and a becoming—an ongoing choreography of interwoven temporalities, where the past vibrates with the present and resonates with the future. Rooted in a principle of reciprocity, Respuestas explores listening as mutual transformation, resonating across time and space in search of new sonic inquiries and resonant continuums.

Respuestas Credits: All tracks by Nicole L’Huillier
Production and Mastering by Juan Necochea
AI Systems and Experiments by Manaswi Mishra
Album design by Stoodio Santiago da Silva
The source material used for this album and its process was gathered during the exhibition Resonaciones at ifa Gallery Stuttgart (2024-25) and at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart (2023). In dialogues and resonances with Francisca Gili, Karen Urcia, Bettina Korintenberg, Carolina Arevalo, Manaswi Mishra, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, Juan Necochea, Luis Muro, Botellas Silbadoras, Santiago da Silva, Linden-Museum Stuttgart, ifa Gallery Stuttgart, Bienal de Artes Mediales (Chile), Buh Records.

Nicole L’Huillier

Nicole L’Huillier (b. 1985) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her practice centers on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity, and the activation of a vibrational imagination. Her work materializes through installations, sonic/vibrational sculptures, custom-made (listening and/or sounding) apparatuses, performances, experimental compositions, membranal poems, and writing. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT (2022). Her work has been shown at the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2025), 14a Bienal do Mercosul (2025), 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024), Tabakalera Donostia (2025), Kunsthalle Bern (2024), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), Shanghai (2023), ifa-Gallery Stuttgart (2023), Bienal de Artes Mediales Santiago (2023, 2021, 2019, 2017), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2022), Transmediale, Berlin (2022), Ars Electronica, Linz (2022, 2019, 2018), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Santiago de Chile (2022), 6th Ural Industrial Biennale, Ekaterinburg (2021), and 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2018), among others.