UN AGUJERO EN MI JARDÍN
Madrid, Spain 2025
in collaboration with Raquel Buj
Sound design Luis Lecea
Madrid Design Festival
Photo by Asier Rua
Room 1.2 of the ILE, with its white walls and rounded shapes, reminds us of a laboratory. Light from the exterior garden filters through the metallic branches of the façade. It inspires us to think about all the processes and exchanges happening underground—a natural laboratory beyond human control. Can we slip through a hole that takes us beneath the garden?
The proposal invites us to shed our human skin and traverse the room through a tunnel made of mycelium skin. Mycelium weaves an invisible network beneath the garden, creating symbiotic relationships between fungi, trees, plants, insects, and bacteria. The installation offers a material, luminous, and sonic experience shaped by invisible processes of growth and transformation.
The mycelium skin makes sounds as it dries and contracts; when it receives water, it expands again, growing and regenerating within the space itself—a delicate yet vast network that connects life within natural ecosystems.
The proposal draws inspiration from aerial mycelium, which develops in growth patterns similar to branches and roots, spreading above its substrate to create a soft, light, and fragile fabric. Entering the space means wandering through that fragility—a place of evolving textures, a space for becoming aware of the vulnerability of the environment we inhabit and of which we are a part.
Beyond enveloping us, the mycelium also acts as a connector of territories through sound. The installation incorporates a sound composition featuring field recordings captured with geophones in the substrate of the Amsterdamse Bos, an artificial forest on the outskirts of Amsterdam. This subacoustic world emerges in the room through floor and oculus vibrations, transforming the piece into a space for listening, where sound—spreading across surfaces—invites us to perceive with our whole body what usually remains beyond hearing.
Materials: Mycelium, natural substrate, cotton fabric, metal structure, multichannel audio, tactile transducers, power amplifier.
