Carla Badillo Coronado (Quito, Ecuador, 1985) is a poet, writer, journalist, translator and experimental sound artist based in Lisbon. Her work mainly focuses on writing and sonic explorations and their different connections between cinema and poetry. She describes her creative process as a full-time laboratory crossed by branches such as philosophy, biology and history, always from a ludic perspective.

 

She has published four books of poetry and one short novel. These are Belongings/Pertenencias (2009; Moradalsur Award 2010), Incomplete Scores (notes on music and other obsessions) (2013; National Poetry Award César Dávila Andrade 2011); The color of pomegranate (2016, Loewe Foundation XXXII International Poetry Prize for young authors), based on the film of the Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov; and AMABILIS INSANIA o el libro de las mutaciones (Ruido Blanco, 2023). In fiction she has published: Abierta sigue la noche (honorable mention in La Linares Award in 2015 and honorable mention in Joaquín Gallegos Lara Award in 2017), distributed by the National Reading Campaign Eugenio Espejo. She has attended multiple literary festivals —including the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, the Toledo Voix Vives, and the Hispanic Heritage Festival from University of Nevada— and some interchange programs on performance in Chile, Poland and Italy.

 

Her relationship with music also starts from a natural interest in the traditional dances of her homeland. She was co-founder and dancer from the group TULLPUCUNA (in quichua: colors) in Ecuador, attending many traditional music and dance festivals in Perú and Colombia. She also has virtual bookstore named SUN RA —librería nómada— (as a tribute to SUN RA, free jazz and afro-futurism prophet). Fascinated by the hybrid and the fragmentary, she immerses herself in different branches of art, translation and travel experiences. However, it is in the exploration of music, improvisation and performance where she finds «the most genuine possibility of rebelling against the tyranny of her own mind».

 

She is part of METAMORPHOSIS, an eclectic and itinerant duo, founded together with his partner Nuno Afonso (Portugal, 1982), strongly based on improvisation and in which she explores all the possibilities of her voice, using electronic, analog and unconventional instruments. Their works include: SHINING (based on the Stanley Kubrick film), the album 20/20 («a reflection of the dystopia of our time»); and Portales (2024).

 

She also carries out other solo projects in which she immerses herself in collage, soundscapes, spoken word and Hip Hop under the name of Durga Black. Some of these works are: 333 (Kokoro, 2019), made from a selection of texts corresponding to pages 3, 33 or 333 of various books and in different languages; TEATRO DE LOS SUEÑOS (Kokoro, 2020) a sound collage constructed from literary fragments and personal dreams taken to the level of improvisation; and INTERFERRED MATTER (Saliva Sonographic Zine, 2020), composed from fragments of the História da Ciência, by Cecil Dampier, De Plantas y Animales, by Ida Vitale, and a postulate by Søren Kierkegaard around the decomposition of matter, where elements such as origin and death appear in a symbiotic way. ​

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In 2021 she obtained the Looren América Latina grant for a residency in literary translation, organized by the prestigious Translation House Looren; and the i Portunus: mobility grant for Music, promoted by the European Commission and the Goethe Institute, which took her to Armenia to develop a new project.​

 

In 2024, she was selected as one of the 12 more representative chroniclers under the age of forty to integrate the book: En otro país (Ed. Candaya), a selection of Spanish and Latin American authors under the age of forty promoted by the Direction of Cultural and Scientific Relations of the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development (AECID) with the intention of "offering some of the best voices of the contemporary chronicle in narratives inspired by a common intention: To portray a country other than one's own, either from within the Spanish-speaking sphere or on its margins, those countries in which somehow no one is a foreigner at all thanks to the same language."

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In March 2025, she was part of the artistic residency MANIFESTOS E MANIFESTAÇÕES, organized by the collective Estrela Decadente (with whom she has actively collaborated, since 2018 // fanzines, concerts) and developed in the Associação Pó de Vir a Ser | Centro Cultural de Évora (former Évora's old slaughterhouse), Alentejo, Portugal.  This transdisciplinary research and artistic creation project includes an upcoming concert in Porto (October) and is supported by DGArtes.​​