A community-thinking aspect to musicking continued to be a priority for Ana María Romano after the Colón Electrónico. As a composer and performer, she works mostly in the fields of electroacoustic composition and improvisation, soundscape and live-electronics, having studied at Universidad de Los Andes with Catalina Peralta, an example for her not only as a composer of electroacoustic music but also as a woman composer working with technology. As a student in the 1990s, during one of the editions of the Festival Internacional de Música Contemporánea de Bogotá, she had the opportunity to see Peralta performing the piece Creación de la tierra by Jacqueline Nova, a key figure in the history of academic music in Colombia and the first composer in the country to be truly involved in the field of electroacoustic music. This moment defined Romano’s views on music and society, and throughout her career, one of her main concerns has been to challenge the figure of the composer as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, white genius. “In the academic musical field, once you decide to be a composer, you become obsessed with being an individual figure and with succeeding as an individual figure (…) what happens if we create collectively?” (A.M. Romano, personal communication, 2022).

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In 2009 Romano organized the first edition of the Festival En Tiempo Real – nuevas propuestas sonoras (In Real Time Festival – new sonic proposals), the concert series she turned her efforts to after the final version of Colón Electrónico. En Tiempo Real started to program concerts around the dialogue between sound and technology, hoping to break with the notion of a specialized audience for electroacoustic music, but has since added other elements to this dialogue and has been renamed as Plataforma Feminista En Tiempo Real – Género/Sonido/Tecnología (Feminist Platform in Real Time – Gender/Sound/Technology). It has expanded from being a music festival, to including educational activities, mainly a “sonic experimentation school for girls, young and adult women”, and publishing, mostly through the creation of a record label. While Colón Electrónico had a lot of support from public and private institutions and universities, Romano and the team of En Tiempo Real have taken a completely different approach to financing and organizing the festival. They have depended on solidarity economy and barter, not only as a means of funding, but also as “political action in the face of the mean-spirited economic system that we have had to endure.” (A.M. Romano, personal communication, 2022). Collaboration, dialogue, and solidarity networks are paramount to Romano and En Tiempo Real, and through those strategies they attempt to build “porous and malleable” communities.

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