Sensory Herbarium. Noah Jordan: From Sonority to Visuality

During his residency at the Lagos | Baja California creative space, artist Noah Dean Jordan carried out a fundamental realignment of his practice. What had been a discipline focused almost exclusively on purely auditory manipulation transformed into a multidisciplinary artistic experience. This shift was not gradual, but rather a philosophical and material breaking point. The rigidity, precision, and absolute control that characterize the traditional musical instrument were abandoned in favor of entering the territory of fragility, textural unpredictability, and the organic nature of Baja California's endemic flora.

The essence of this profound reorientation lay in the active, performative, and compositional incorporation of botanical elements gathered in a conscious and respectful manner. These specimens ceased to be mere decorative or conceptual accessories and became compositional agents and co-creators of the sonic universe. By integrating materials with such diverse acoustic properties as bougainvillea, white sage, cactus thorns, the delicate African iris, and dry manzanita branches, Noah not only dramatically expanded his palette of sonic textures. He managed to move fluidly from the ethereal and almost inaudible harmony produced by subtle friction, to the random, rough, and clearly percussive effects generated by the manipulation of dry and brittle materials.

This new material approach imposed, in turn, a redefinition of bodily posture and choreography in space. The physical handling and intimate contact with these species dictated a new gestural vocabulary for the artist, compelling him to adopt a freer, more organic and performative stance, where the body moved in direct and reactive dialogue with the shape and texture of the plant.

The exercise of real-time composition and improvisation was meticulously conceived as an act of sensory translation. The constant and mutable interaction between the natural light falling on the space, the sculptural form projected by the botanical specimens, and the variable color of their leaves and flowers, was transformed into a visual script that dictated the temporal structure and emerging sonic density. A new performative visuality was thus forged. At the center of the scene, the dramatic contrast between the organic and the technical — the living, ephemeral body of the plant set against the instrument — highlighted and magnified the essentially ephemeral and transitory quality of sound. This tension between botanical life and technology became the axis of the work.

In this way, each botanical specimen — a dry leaf, a thorn, a branch — acted as a living agent, an undeniable co-creator, whose physical presence and intrinsic acoustic properties not only altered the artist's movement and micro-choreography in the space, but also modulated the very structure of the sonic composition. The work resulting from this residency, more than a mere recording or a traditional musical piece, consolidates itself as a sensory and acoustic herbarium. It is a portfolio of tactile, auditory, and visual moments that explicitly celebrates the aleatory, the tactile richness, and the inherent beauty of processes of decomposition, regeneration, and undomesticated wild life. Noah Dean Jordan's residency at Lagos, therefore, culminated in a deep and materialized meditation on the ecology of sound, the aesthetics of fragility, and the symbiotic interaction between the human body and the arid, vibrant, and singular landscape of Baja California.

Eduardo Lozano Murillo

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