Can a Building Be a Musical Instrument?

When Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz [Centro Botín’s artistic director] first advanced this dual invitation for what was to become Enredos II—to commission new works of mine to be presented alongside works from the Fundación Botín’s collection—its first iteration was just wrapping up, featuring newly commissioned works and curatorship by Eva Fàbregas. Both its generosity and responsibility fully on display: neither a solo show consisting solely of new commissions or previously unseen works, nor a group show consisting solely of works from the collection, but both simultaneously.

Through Rodríguez Muñoz’s proposal, the Centro Botín not only revisits works by previous grantees of the Fundación Botín’s visual arts grants programme, but asks both institution and artist to reassess themselves and each other. To rethink together how relationships may be nurtured beyond the yearly grant programme that has been running for 30 years now; each year, formalized as a group show where each grantees research and practice is showcased in public. It may be from this exact point that Rodríguez Muñoz got the idea for the title Enredos [tangles], since the grantees’ yearly exhibition is titled Itinerarios [paths]. A muddle of crisscrossing paths drawing entanglements: each path enmeshed with a myriad other paths.

If being commissioned to produce new work is refracted by also assuming the role of co-curator—accompanying Rodríguez Muñoz—its dual character involves both great generosity and great challenges: to focus on one’s own artistic practice while paying close attention and reflecting on those of other practitioners; fostering a polysemic understanding of heterogeneous practices that can hold space for works in progress and unknown materialities. My personal take was, again, dual. On one hand, to regard the whole as an ecology, as sets of relations, where the centrality that I’d occupy was less a focal point but, instead, another node in a network of entanglements. One where disparate agencies mutually influence and feed each other, much in the same way ecosystems thrive. And on the other hand, to fold down the inherent multiplicity of entanglement to a common denominator. One predicated on listening as affect and noise-making as community: sympathetic resonance—the capability of bodies to attune and vibrate according to vibrations emanating from other bodies, due to similar and shared resonant frequencies.

And since I was being invited to show my own work amidst and in relation to works in the collection by other artists (consisting of previous grantees’ such as Asier Mendizabal, Eva Fàbregas, Javier Arce, June Crespo, Jorge Satorre, Katinka Bock, or workshop tutors such as Damian Ortega and Tacita Dean), my proposal insisted on inviting yet more practitioners, colleagues, collaborators, to further ripple the effects of this one stone thrown onto a lattice of liquid relations; adding more gravitational nodes to an already-enmeshed archipelago.

Collected Airs (2025)—a series of purposefully built reverberation units, commonly known as plate reverbs (an old analogue audio effects unit consisting of a single sheet of steel, tautly suspended, to which a transducer has been applied, so that any signal that gets sent to the transducer is amplified by the plate and reverberates until it fades out)—are meant as springboards for a series of invited musicians (Pedro Alves Sousa, Inês Tartaruga Água and Xavier Paes, João Pais Filipe, Angélica Salvi, and Margarida Garcia—all hailing from Lisbon’s and Porto’s free music scenes) to play through, with or against. Or put in another way: five reverberation units thought of as five independent sound systems, each dedicated to holding a different performance by a specific musician invited to improvise freely using their instrument of choice. All the while, and in advance of each performance, the five plates are the loci of another concurrent transmission: a continuous audio livestream of environmental sound from the Centro Botín’s immediate vicinity, transmitting in real-time. Before holding the acoustic and spectral ghosts of performances to come, the plates sound in unison with the ambience outside. After each performance, both outputs—music and environmental sound—are mixed together and left playing on a loop via one of the plates. As performances follow each other at the rhythm of one per month for five months, recordings will get deposited like sonic silt in an archaeo-acoustic riverbed. What is, for now, a solo will turn into a duo, then a trio, then a quartet, and finally reach a quintet. Concurrently, the unison of each day’s ambience will be progressively replaced by a polyphony of five disparate days gone by.

The other gesture towards multiplying the number and possibilities of entanglement pays particular attention to the interplay between my work and those of others, the exhibition space and the audience, considered as co-inhabitants or co-actants: for Bay of Santander Sonic Disposal Service (2025) I recorded the Centro Botín’s own physical vibrations—those felt and amplified through the building’s own steel infrastructure (that fall within the lowest part of the energy spectrum, the infrasonic) and reintegrated them on the exhibition’s purposefully-built walls by means of bass transducers. But not before modulating these more-or-less constant frequencies with the inconsistencies and variations of environmental scientific data provided by the Centro Oceanográfico of Santander. Water temperature, salinity, wind speed, and maximum wave height as registered every hour for two years (2022 to 2024) by the Augusto de Linares buoy, moored roughly 22 miles away from Santander, force the drones and monotones of the architecture’s own song to vary in pitch, tempo or intensity, depending on how those natural variations act upon the original recordings. Now heard and felt through the wooden-panelled walls of the exhibition, the huge, complex ecological relations and consequences of ever-changing weather and climate patterns mark and pinpoint the exhibition’s own gradual progress from vibrational body to vibrational environment: the exhibition walls and visitors’ bodies as resonators for an architecture in constant vibration, as the deep-time of climate reverberates in the here and now.



Nuno da Luz (Portugal, 1984) is a sound artist, publisher and researcher whose work circumscribes both aural and visual in the form of installations, performances, and printed matter. Grounded in attentive listening as an eco-sensible methodology, his practice undulates between the ecologies and pedagogies of noise-making, and bookmaking through the publishing collective ATLAS (Lisbon).



Nuno Da Luz: Enredos II in on view at Centro Botín until 19 October 2025.



Feature image: Katinka Bock, Feuilles de température, 2022. Nuno Da Luz: Enredos II. Courtesy Centro Botín. Photo: Belén de Benito