By using vocal performances using content from voice recognition and accent recognition databases, A Series of Gaps Rather than a Presence builds a new form of anti-archive sonic insolence. Oliveira examines acts of collecting, ranking, taxonomizing, and normalizing vocal traits and their subsequent weaponization in the border-industrial complex. 

Oliveira is currently a lecturer and research associate in Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf. His work inquires the colonial politics of sonic violence, and in particular the articulations of police violence and the policing of bodies through sound and listening practices. His current artistic research intervenes on accent recognition technologies within the migration and border industry in Germany and the EU.

Along with Luiza Prado, Pedro Oliveira’s work is usually found as one half of the Berlin based A Parede, developing artistic and pedagogical research projects. According to A Parede “Our work advances a decolonizing framework for inquiring and intervening on material practices, with a particular interest in matters of culture, gender and sound studies”. He is also part of Decolonising Design, an online platform which seeks to provide a voice for marginalised artists as well as create a strategy to undo the hegemonic structure of global praxis.