Felipe Ledesma Núñez is an Ecuadorian artist and historian of sound. He reads colonial archives, studies archaeological artifacts, and molds clay to explore the long history of Andean ritual.
Ledesma reads archives from a native perspective and crafts ceramics to counter symbolic silencing. His introspective scholarship attends to perception and cognition, and to the colonial structures that shape his world. His ears are open to the ancestral voices that colonial powers sought to eradicate and that lettered epistemologies deem impossible.
This approach has yielded remarkable discoveries, including the first known archival documentation of whistling bottles and the earliest reconstruction of a Quechua song.
Ledesma is the first Ecuadorian national to receive a PhD from Harvard in any discipline. He has presented at numerous international events, including the keynote lecture at the “Sound Faith: Religion in the Acoustic World, 1400-1800” conference at the University of York. His research has been supported by Dumbarton Oaks, the Society for American Music, and Harvard Horizons. His writing appears in Musicology Now, Dumbarton Oaks, and ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America.
At Yale, Ledesma is completing a monograph titled Coya Huarmi: Reconstruction of a Song, A Vessel, and an Ancestor’s Voice, which examines how a seventeenth-century highland community manufactured voice to materialize ancestral presence, and an exhibition titled Uyak/Yaku.