NUNO DA LUZ
Lisbon, Portugal, 1984
Received the Fundación Botín Art Grant in 2012

Collected Airs, 2025
Five reverb units (steel plates, steel racks, transducers, amplifiers, multimedia players, streambox, microphone), live music improvisation programme.
Acquired in 2025

This sound installation comprises 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 – before modern digital acoustic processing technology. The artist recreates the reverb unit as an interface, which interacts with its environment and functions as a kind of stopwatch.

Nuno invited Pedro Alves Sousa (saxophone), Inês Tartaruga Água and Xavier Paes, João Pais Filipe (percussion), Angélica Salvi (harp) and Margarida Garcia (electric double bass),

performers from the Portuguese music scene, to improvise and play with each reverb unit every month for the duration of Enredos II exhibition (Centro Botín, 2025). Each musician’s performance was 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: its changing weather and the unpredictable events that comprise it.