The exhibition
ENREDOS II: NUNO DA LUZ
24 May - 19 October 2025
Enredos II is the second chapter of the exhibition programme Enredos (entanglements), whose goal is to continue supporting and collaborating with artists who have received a Fundación Botín Art Grant and engage them once again with Fundación Botín´s collection, Centro Botin´s architecture and its public.
For this exhibition Nuno da Luz (Lisbon, 1984) amplifies the frequencies of the waves and the winds felt in the Bay of Santander, interweaving them with their oscillations of the building itself and a selection of works by artists that, like him in 2015, were beneficiaries of Fundación Botín´s Art Grants: Javier Arce (2006), Katinka Bock (2015), June Crespo (2018), Eva Fàbregas (2010), Asier Mendizabal (2005), and Jorge Satorre (2011) as well as works by Tacita Dean and Damián Ortega, artists which are also part of the collection.
Nuno da Luz’s work can be defined as ‘environmental art’ that, aside from dealing with environmental processes — such as weather and climate change — translates the intensities, rhythms and patterns of these phenomena into sounds that transform spaces and architecture. The artist works with the sound sources of a specific context and their potential for vibrational transformation.
The exhibition includes three new sound installations from the artist produced by Fundación Botín that generate shared listening spaces. The link between these works by Nuno and the Fundación Botín collection’s pieces, architecture and surroundings of Centro Botín can be understood through ‘sympathetic resonance’, that is, a type of co-resonance, that occurs without any contact between objects when a body in a state of rest responds to the external vibrations of others it shares harmonic similarities with. This polyphony of works and vibrations encourages us to ‘be all ears’, not as a mere act of perception, rather as a way of establishing collective, sensitives and critical modes of relating.
Curators: Nuno da Luz and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz
The sound installation Bay of Santander Sonic Disposal Service is distributed in four listening points throughout the exhibition and converts the environmental data of the Santander coast into vibrations and sound through the walls of the exhibition space.
Each point, indicated by a symbol, is equipped with a hidden transducer that transforms a series of data provided by the Santander Oceanographic Centre (IEO-CSIC) including salinity, water temperature, wind speed and maximum wave height. The data was collected between 2022 and 2024 by the Augusto González de Linares buoy, anchored about 22 miles north of Cabo Mayor. At the same time, the transducers amplify the building’s own vibrations, extending and intensifying their intrinsic energies.
The work Foghorn blows for approximately 30 minutes; the same interval of time scheduled between the boats departing from Palacete del Embarcadero to El Puntal beach during summer season, locations that can be seen looking towards the East of the bay.
The sound installation Collected Airs, produced by Fundación Botín with the support of the Portuguese Embassy in Spain. Portugal-Spain Cultural Programme: 50 Years of Culture and Democracy, is a set of reverb units: large steel plates, equipped with a transducer that converts audio signals into physical vibration. This type of plate is used in sound studios to add spatial depth to recordings.
Nuno has invited different performers from the Portuguese music scene to improvise with each reverb unit throughout this exhibition.
- 30 May: Pedro Alves Sousa (saxophone)
- 16 Julio: Inês Tartaruga Água y Xavier Paes
- 13 August: João Pais Filipe (percussion)
- 10 September: Angélica Salvi (harp)
- 1 October: Margarida Garcia (double bass)
Each musician’s performance is thus recorded and played back through their assigned plate in the exhibition space, causing the installation to mutate and amplify its sound sources with each activation. The plates not only transmit these performances, they also resonate with a live transmission of ambient sounds emanating from outside Centro Botín. In this way, each plate serves not only as a musical record but as a timestamp, preserving the traces of a specific moment.
Nuno da Luz
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). Recent projects include solo show ‘Airs’ at Galeria Vera Cortês (Lisbon, 2024); group show ‘Feral Ballads’ at Cité internationale des arts (Paris, 2024); the monograph ‘Poetry as an echological survival’ (Lisbon/Porto: Sistema Solar/UCPress, 2022); and the LP ‘Beasts of Gravity’ in collaboration with Joana Escoval (London: The Vinyl Factory, 2019).
