About
During the world’s hottest summer of 2024, Nicolás Carcavilla was invited into Gatica’s studio to compose the soundtrack for his video installation, then known as The Sanhattan Project.
Before the music began, Ignacio lured him into a fiction. While they were in Santiago, he told him a story about doppelgängers haunting the glass towers and financial mirages of Sanhattan. He revealed only fragments, keeping the mystery alive and letting it expand in the back of the mind. That secrecy opened a doorway connecting with Carcavilla’s own work: a vision of cities as haunted architectures.
Sanhattan sounds like utopian shopping mall music, like sunset reflecting against mirrored high-rise glass, surrounded by aspiration, speculation and ghosts. It carries the pressure of imported economic dreams, the oppressive machinery of the Chicago Boys’ influence, and the strange beauty of a city pretending to be eternal.
The music moves like a synthetic landscape: corporate, luminous, devotional, and sometimes fragile. On the video, it accompanies the poetic reflections of Ileana Elordi and the gravitational narration of Cristalina Parra.
Sanhattan is the sound of towers dreaming.
The sound of doubles walking through glass.
Credits:
Music by Nicolas Carcavilla for Sanhattan a video installation by Ignacio Gatica for the 82nd Whitney Biennial, 2026.