Technology & Systems / Workshop

A creative residency alongside Pixelazo Electronic Arts Festival in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia. The world premiere of Marrakattak, a percussive latino audiovisual instrument built from a set of modified, midi maracas. The work fused geometric symbolism from Aztec, Zapotec, and Mayan culture, with glitch based 8-bit sound and road-trip video footage. Half ritual, half circuitry, transforming a traditional instrument into a live digital interface.

Funded by the British Council, Marrakattak was designed for cross-cultural encounters to introduce digital ways of making to indigenous communities, while maintaining deep respect to cultural imagery and the ritual origins of rhythm. Workshops and performances were delivered in Comuna 13, Medellín, and across the festival locations, in collaboration with Scottish VJ collective Pointless Creations.

More recently, Marrakattak was performed on stage at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, for Trocabrahma. A festival shaped by the spirit of Tropicália, the early 70s cultural movement that collapsed poetry, theatre, and music into a single, rebellious energy, splicing British and American psychedelia with distinctly Brazilian sounds. In that context, the instrument returned to its natural habitat, live, unruly, and unhinged, performed alongside the eccentric Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), the gloriously barmy Tony da Gattora (inventor of the guitar–synth mutant “Gattora”), and Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy.

Marrakattak blurred the line between activism, art, and play, and positioned technology as a tool for dialogue and creative disruption. These experiences shape how GABBA.TV thinks about external, social and cultural dynamics and how they can be creatively integrated back into institutional and educational contexts, reinforcing the idea that meaningful innovation always begins with exchange.