Juan David Rubio Restrepo

This article focuses on the collaboration between Colombian black accordionist Carmelo Torres, the most renown performer of accordion cumbia, and Bogotá-based band Los Toscos, a group of academically trained white-mestizo musicians. Considering Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as representative of the current state of cumbia's global circulation and in dialogue with the growing corpus of scholarly works on the topic, this article traces how this collaboration has circulated on local, national, and transnational scales and theorizes the different discourses of music, race, and nation that emerge from it. Using recent critiques by thinkers of colour to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I propose the idea of the racial assemblage and put it in dialogue with contributions to critical geography by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as well as current music scholarship from Latin America and the global north to build a interdisciplinary study that thinks embodied musicking in place. In a small venue in Bogotá, Colombia, a sweaty crowd dances to a mild-tempo cumbia beat. The sound booms across the room, traversing with vibrations that move across the nearly 100 bodies. Heat is generated by the movement commanded by the hypnotic groove emanating from the stage, making the temperature considerably higher than it is outside; a tropical microclimate in the grey Andean plateau. In the venue, mainly filled by white mestizos in their twenties and thirties, there is one body that stands out. On the stage, a few centimetres above the audience, a black accordionist in his sixties commands the ritual as if he were a snake charmer. The accordion interlaces with sounds from a group playing distorted guitar, fuzzed electric bass, and crashing cymbals. A third person sings on the stage. Wearing stylish shades, the singer recites verses with a paused and fluid style. When the chorus kicks-in, the singer suddenly approaches the accordionist. Sharing the microphone momentarily and bringing the house down, together they sing: 'porque una cosa es el indio/y otra cosa es la antropología' ('because the indian is one thing/ and anthropology is another').

The author presents a concept of ritualized performance as an ideal way to approach the telematic medium, arguing that many longstanding performance rituals share characteristics that can be exploited in networked performance. The author situates these ideas in relation to his project Spatia, seeking to illustrate how the model of ritualized performance can be applied to the networked medium.