DARK MATTER | SOUND INSTALLATION (2026)

A line drawing of the boots that took me everywhere and fell apart

It was 2022. I was doing fieldwork in the Alpujarran mountains when calima, a Saharan dust carried on the wind, settled everywhere: on surfaces, in the air, in the body. An all-pervasive, abject yet intimate substance that became a mode of thinking. With it I composed Dark Matter (2026), a 33-minute soundscape from peripheral encounters, passing impressions and fragments gathered during research across southern Spain. Like dust, the work resists containment: sounds accumulate, overlap, settle, disappear and return, forming an unclassified composition. Rather than illustrate place or explain experience, it invites listeners into a space where relations emerge through resonance instead of than narrative.

Recorded between the rural mountains of the Alpujarra and the industrialised coast of Almería, the work moves through landscapes shaped by extraction, ecological crisis, migration and competing futures. Storms, cats in heat, village fiestas, helicopters responding to wildfire, markets and protests by North African greenhouse workers appear alongside each other. Listening becomes hybrid and multidimensional: ecological, political, affective and embodied. A way of attending to how worlds are entangled. Presented in darkness, Dark Matter removes the organising authority of image, inviting listeners to remain with ambiguity, proximity and interruption. 

 

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