You can listen to ‘Por La Mañanita’ and the rest of the Sonic Kinships soundtrack here

Track 05, Violeta Parra, Por la mañanita (1961)

Violeta Parra was never just a singer. She built structures. Songs where people could gather, where solidarity could live. Through her Peña de los Parra, she created a community arts center where students, workers, and Indigenous musicians gathered to reclaim Chile’s folk traditions. This was an insurgent pedagogy. By placing Mapuche and other Indigenous voices at the heart of Chile’s identity, Parra confronted the silences of colonial erasure and neoliberal destruction. Her verses braided grief, activism, and love, ensuring that song could be a practice of collective survival. “Por la mañanita” is an everyday hymn — of mornings and awakenings, but also of vigilance and endurance.

The Chile that Parra sang into being was also the Chile of Salvador Allende that came after her death: socialism by transparency. One of its most daring projects was Cybersyn, or Proyecto Synco, a cybernetic network of telex machines, predictive software, and the Opsroom — a futuristic control centre designed by Stafford Beer, Jorge Barrientos, Gui Bonsiepe, Pepa Foncea, and Lucia Wormald among an extensive team of architects, engineers, and designers. Its aim was audacious: to make socialism efficient, adaptive, and accountable. Open to the whole population of Chile. Architecture here was political science. As Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Hugo Palmarola, and Eden Medina have shown, Cybersyn was not simply technology but scenography: hexagonal chairs arranged in a circle, information screens surrounding their users, a stage where knowledge was shared rather than hoarded. Accountability was performed spatially. To sit in the Opsroom was to inhabit an architecture that refused secrecy; one where flows of production, shortages, and worker reports became visible and actionable. Cybersyn, like the lives of Allende and thousands of Chileans, was cut short by the brutal regime of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, under neocolonial extractive powers that wanted to maintain and even accelerate the dispossession of the country.

But Parra’s song and Cybersyn’s design still pulsates, drawing one to the same challenge: how to dismantle opacity. The song illuminated what the previous and later governments tried to repress — memory, grief, dispossession. Cybernetics illuminated what capitalism would hide — data, flows, the collective pulse of production. Both enacted forms of accountability, through melody and through coding. Yet, as Marina Otero has argued, infrastructures of data are never innocent. Today’s data centres mourn not only the information they guard but also the bodies, ecologies, and energies consumed in their upkeep. Technology is extractive, fed by cobalt mines, rare earth minerals, and precarious labour. Cybersyn’s optimism, read against this horizon, reveals the double edge of data: its emancipatory promise and its material violence. To build a nervous system for society is also to expose the fragility and exploitation on which it depends.

This reckoning with technological infrastructures continued in Inteligencias Reflexivas, curated by Serena Dambrosio, Nicolás Díaz Bejarano, and Linda Schilling Cuéllar. Their project reframed artificial intelligence not as disembodied or immaterial, but as rooted in ecologies of extraction, cultural memory, and social struggle. It argues that intelligence — whether folk, cybernetic, or artificial — is always situated, collective, and entangled with relations of care and exploitation. In dialogue with Parra’s insurgent pedagogy and Cybersyn’s scenography, Inteligencias Reflexivas insists that to speak of intelligence is also to speak of accountability and mourning.

As in Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild, intimacy can be symbiosis, even to the point of parasitism: to survive, bodies must surrender autonomy and share vulnerability. Parra’s music, Cybersyn’s architecture, Otero’s reflections on data mourning, and the Inteligencias Reflexivas pavilion: all of these resonate in a similar key. They suggest that survival depends on porosity, on opening to others, on acknowledging dependence rather than denying it. “Por la mañanita” reminds us that mornings begin with exposure, with light falling across bodies. Cybersyn made Chile’s industrial body porous, visible, accountable; Otero reminds us that the infrastructures we inherit today are entangled with mourning, their very functioning haunted by the exhaustion of the earth; and Inteligencias Reflexivas reframes intelligence itself as a situated, fragile practice. They insist that accountability means not just making flows visible but reckoning with the cost of keeping them alive. To design is always to decide what becomes visible, what remains opaque, and what is sacrificed along the way.