CONSTELLATIONS IN THE DARK | SOUNDSCAPE (2026)

Forest Fire in Los Guajares (2022), ink and charcoal on paper 

Constellations in the Dark (2026) is a slow 33-minute sound installation composed from tangential moments gathered during ethnographic fieldwork across southern Spain. It forms part of an interactive ethnographic toolbox developed through my doctoral research, Politics of Matter: Constellations of Landscape, Value and Utopianism. Rather than presenting a coherent documentary account, the work assembles peripheral encounters, passing impressions and unresolved fragments that often remain outside conventional ethnographic representation. 

The soundscape moves between the rural mountains of the Alpujarra and the industrialised coast of Almería, traversing landscapes shaped by competing political imaginaries and uneven histories of extraction, agriculture, migration and alternative forms of living. Listeners encounter recognisable and obscure sonic registers: the violence of a storm, cats in heat, village fiestas, helicopters responding to wildfire, bustling markets, and protests by North African greenhouse workers. These sounds do not seek to illustrate place or explain experience. Instead, they invite listeners into a space where relations emerge through resonance rather than narrative.

Presented in darkness, in the absence of image, the installation asks what becomes possible when vision – and the impulse to classify, interpret and fix meaning – is temporarily suspended. What remains at the margins of politics? What continues to breathe? At a time marked by polarisation and the relentless pursuit of progress, Constellations in the Dark offers an invitation to linger with uncertainty, to delve into the complex multiplicity and fertility of sound, to attend to what is partial, unfinished and in flux.

What happens when we linger in the dark?