Instal·lació sonora "Spiral of Time (Espiral del temps)"

From 10 July 2025 to 11 January 2027, you can listen to Spiral of Time (Espiral del temps) from the museum's exhibition space. A site-specific work that, since July 2024, has recorded the ambient sounds of the Plaça dels Àngels, building a sonic and temporal account of this space. Sound is intangible and ephemeral, yet it may still be one of the most decisive characteristics of the spaces it occupies. Spiral of Time is an in situ work by the artist, composer and researcher Edwin van der Heide (Hilversum, 1970) that explores sound and its relationship with space and time.A system of microphones installed on the facade of the MACBA Centre for Study and Documentation has been recording the ambient sounds of the Plaça dels Àngels since 17 July 2024, and will continue recording until July 2027. The resulting sound archive, organised by time intervals, proposes several ways of understanding the idiosyncrasies of the museum's immediate surroundings through cyclical patterns of sound that are the product of the rhythms of both nature and human activity. The archive forms a sonic portrait in which the patterns, which are often imperceptible in real time, manifest themselves through sounds captured at different moments.Presented in dialogue with recordings of the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, produced in collaboration with scientists from the National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) and the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), the work invites visitors to immerse themselves in the artist's long-term research into urban soundscapes and experiments in «natural radio», which offer a nuanced understanding of human and non-human habitats through vibrations.The Spiral of Time project explores the way listening can shape the environment, connect different sound zones and regulate the sonic-spatial reality.Spiral of Time makes use of a web interface that offers unique possibilities for navigating the recordings at different speeds. Time is visually represented by a spiral that allows one to intuitively grasp hours, weeks, months or years.By choosing a path along this spiral, users can perceive and discover new relationships between sounds and time that are exclusive to the context of the museum.