Concierto de pelo

Concierto de Pelo (Hair Concert), 2008–2024

Performance

Hair Concerts is a long-term, process-based sonic practice in which Leticia Izrego uses hair as instrument, archive, and political material. The project departs from a simple but charged premise: hair is a threshold matter—intimate to the body, yet abject once detached. This unstable status activates taboo, discomfort, fascination, and humor, which the work mobilizes as method.

Rather than treating hair as ornament or fetishized surface, the project displaces it into the acoustic realm. Sound interrupts the visual economy that has historically coded the “feminine hairdo” within patriarchal imaginaries. Drawing on Erika Bornay’s analysis of hair as eroticized symbol, the work re-routes this history: hair becomes friction instead of seduction, noise instead of spectacle.

The project’s origins lie in a collective action (2008), when a circle of women produced a shared soundscape using hair—framing the concert as relational situation rather than staged performance. In Concierto (2010), Izrego strikes her hair against her teeth, turning the mouth into amplifier and proposing a bodily language beyond authorized speech. Here the poststructuralist grounding becomes explicit: if identity is shaped through discourse, and discourse is never neutral, the answer is not to repair inherited language but to invent another register—musical, embodied, excessive.

Later iterations expand this logic. Hair appears as offering, residue, cut material—echoing ritual sacrifice and feminist gestures such as Frida Kahlo’s self-shearing. The work dialogues with artists like Eulàlia Valldosera and Itziar Okariz, situating bodily remainder as critical matter. In instruction-based and site-responsive versions (e.g., Columbiello 2023 and El Telart), the concert becomes collective score, dependent on complicity and shared risk, rooted in territory and memory.

Hair Concerts ultimately insists on sonic agency: transforming hair from a patriarchally coded surface into a medium through which identity, taboo, humor, and power can be heard rather than merely seen.