Filipino sound artist and kinetic sculptor Marco Ortiga spent two months at Rimbun Dahan in 2026, focusing on field recordings and deep listening, and creating a site-responsive installation. For Open Day on Sunday 25 October 2026, visitors are invited to step into the role of composer, and use the custom soundboxes to create their own acoustic landscape.
About the Artist
Marco Ortiga (b. 1984, Manila) is a sound artist and kinetic sculptor whose work synthesizes mechanical engineering, ambient sculpture, and live performance to transform the environments it occupies. Drawing from a background in production design for film and music videos as well as metal fabrication, Ortiga approaches artmaking through hands-on experimentation, translating complex conceptual ideas into interactive physical mechanisms.
His sound practice often incorporates custom-built DIY instruments, field recordings, and found sounds to create immersive, audience-driven encounters. His live performances integrate these instruments alongside audio samples to build dynamic and immersive soundscapes. In his latest solo exhibition, Ortiga transformed discarded fishing boats into kinetic sculptures to highlight the relationship between people and their environment, telling the story of local fishermen and the hardships of their daily livelihood. Most recently, he was featured in ALT Philippines 2026 as part of Vinyl on Vinyl’s Discoveries section.
Marco is also a founding member of SOMATOSONIC, an interdisciplinary art collective formed alongside Tad Ermitano and Christina Dy, with whom he creates sound installations and performs experimental electronic music.
https://www.instagram.com/marcoortiga
About the Residency
During my two-month residency at Rimbun Dahan, I wanted to focus on my sound practice and experiment mainly with field recordings and deep listening. This stems directly from my journey as an artist living in Manila, where rapid development and poor urban planning have left almost no natural green spaces within the city. For most of my life, the surrounding soundscape has been traffic, construction, and mechanical noise. Rimbun Dahan is the complete opposite. Living here, I was surrounded by nature, and listening to intense insect choruses and canopy sounds completely shifted how I perceive acoustic space.
For this residency, I wanted to create a site-responsive installation that acts as a sonic portrait of my time here. My performance methodology relies heavily on live volume control and layer balancing. I keep multiple recordings running continuously in the background, actively fading individual tracks in and out to compose the piece in real time. This dynamic mixing technique serves as a direct artistic representation of the ongoing negotiation between natural environments and human interaction. To keep the work strictly grounded in the place itself, I follow one core rule: no outside synthesizers, sound packs, or digital instruments. Every single sound heard in the piece comes strictly from recordings made on-site or objects collected during my stay. By altering speed, pitch, and texture with audio effects while dynamically balancing layers in real time, I aim to create an immersive experience that shares my personal journey at Rimbun Dahan.
For the Open Day, I invite the audience to step into the role of composer through an interactive sound installation. I have built custom soundboxes, each loaded with a unique field recording, allowing visitors to adjust both their volume and position using a hanging system throughout the space. As people move through the area and alter the placement of each unit, they dynamically reconfigure the acoustic landscape, creating their own personalized surround-sound environment to share in my experience of Rimbun Dahan.
