Viviana Ramos was born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1988.
She began studying music, piano at an early age, and then continued her studies of oboe and composition at the Conservatory and later at the University of the Arts of Cuba (ISA).
During her studies, she started working in theater as a sound designer as well as voice and singing teacher. She taught musical analysis and harmony at the National School of Music (ENA) for several years. During her years of study and training, she developed several projects, as a curator and producer, some of them in collaboration with the National Laboratory of Electroacoustic Music in Havana (LNME). One of them was the Primavera Festival in Havana, where she co-created and collaborated with composers German Toro-Perez, Carlos Hidalgo, Annette Vande Gorne Annette Vande Gorne and Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans, Neil Leonard, Clemens von Reusner, and Kristi Allik, among others.
Her training as an artist is interdisciplinary. During her years of study, Viviana Ramos worked in collaboration with other artists from the world of photography, video, performance, and film. This favored her knowledge of these media and allowed her to incorporate these resources into her musical projects with a critical look at music and the medium in which it is created and presented.
Thus, creations such as “Imagofonia” and “Estudio para tocar la pieza” were born. The first, a performance-installation, in which the “musical scores” are printed on photographic paper and shown as photographs. The second is a happening, where the “public” attends a moment where the musician is simply practicing a piece, as is usual in the daily training of a classical musician.
During those years, she collaborated with several artists, participating in various Biennials in Havana. This allowed her to attend workshops with Gabriel Orozco, Hemann Nitsch, Marina Abramovic, Antoni Muntadas, among others.
In 2016, she created the project HavanaModerno, a platform for interdisciplinary arts, collaborating with renowned artists such as Carolina Eyck (theremin), Thorwald Jorguensen, Ernesto Mendoza, Lera Auerbach, the Delta Piano Trio, and the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, among others.
Statement
Viviana Ramos’ work is interdisciplinary.
In her work with music and sound, she uses genres such as sound installation, happening, environment, sound performance, electroacoustic works, and traditional formats of the western musical tradition to express her ideas, criticisms, or comments.
Among her main interests: the artist (musician) as a “subject”, the “creator-spectator” relationship, the perception of “reality” in the environment, our relationship and response to what we understand as “natural”, and power relations. These follow the aesthetics of Fluxus conceptual art and some of its most prominent creators, such as Nam June-Paik and John Cage, as well as Morton Feldman, Mauricio Kagel, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rautchembert, Umberto Eco, Marshall Macluhan, and Baudelaire.
She is particularly interested in “music” as a medium, and its ways of relating to the audience, moving towards the zones of doubt, discomfort, absurdity, and the limits of what is perceived and understood as music and art, exploring in this sense the “role” of the composer as creator, artist.