João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, musician and sound designer whose work spans immersive installation, sound art, contemporary composition, improvisation, electroacoustic composition, printmaking, composition for film and theatre and interdisciplinary site-specific intervention.
Orecchia works extensively with themes of identity and belonging, the subjective nature of reality, anti-hierarchical systems and alternative value systems.
Born in Brooklyn, NY to a Peruvian mother and an Italian father, he grew up in the city’s mixed immigrant communities, in all their contradictory beauty, displacement and unsettledness. With a strong connection to an elusive somewhere-else, Orecchia has always been drawn towards unfamiliar territory.
In 2005, Orecchia relocated to Johannesburg. Plugging into the underground music and visual arts scenes, the city provided an endless source of inspiration and wonderful confusion. Orecchia carved a unique space for himself that sits comfortably between these seemingly incongruous spaces, working with Afrorock group BLK JKS, Thandiswa Mazwai, classical and new music pianist Jill Richards and Lukas Ligeti to name a few as well as world renowned visual artists such as William Kentridge and Kudzanai Chiurai.
While living in Johannesburg, Orecchia completed a masters degree in digital arts, which led him to an increasing interest the nature of sound itself, how sound acts in space and how bodies are affected by the movement and vibration of sound. His installations seek to uncover the relationships between individual sounds in movement and observe their interaction.
This carries over into his musical work where he composes for unusual ensembles, collaborates with improvising musicians and composes and performs solo works for his current instrumental obsessions, the bass clarinet and the modular synthesiser.
Orecchia has received a South African Film & Television Award for sound design and has published in the Leonardo Music Journal and the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. He taught sound design for four years at the Film and Television department of the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
He is currently based in Marseille, France.