CURVATURA: Laura Llaneli

For more than a decade, Laura Llaneli has worked with sound as a threshold object of study. She is interested in what happens just before something sounds or when it has already stopped sounding. The whisper, the silence, the minimal vibration, the background noise, the frequencies that go unnoticed within societies saturated with stimuli. Her work approaches the infraordinary, that which appears insignificant but, when listened to attentively, completely transforms the experience of space and time.

 

The works presented belong to different moments of her practice, but all share this same concern. They force us to refine our listening. Audio appears as a trace; it could be a compressed memory or even a secret, manifesting itself as physical and emotional resonance. Sometimes it is not perceived directly; sometimes it is only imagined, other times it remains as a trapped frequency.

 

Contact Car (2026) departs precisely from this idea of retained reverberation. Built from the history of the gallery space, which was previously a garage, the work activates the sonic memory of what is no longer there. The car appears as a body that still contains hidden sounds. The slight, minimal noises are displaced from what we normally associate with the automobile. It is neither the engine running nor speed, but frictions and almost imperceptible vibrations, as if the object continued resonating after having stopped functioning. The reference to ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) runs through the piece, but the whispering voice disappears and only the physical proximity of the rattling remains, attached to the space without fully revealing itself.

 

The work Tapping studies I  (2026) extends this gesture. The photographic series captures the hands as visual remnants of an action that no longer takes place but continues reverberating within the installation. In the same way that the voice disappears in Contact Car, here the gesture remains suspended and fragmented into images. Seeing the hands and hearing the small taps activates movement within memory, as if the body completed what is missing.

 

This displacement finds a direct counterpoint in Secretos (2025). The micro SD cards contain whispered confessions recorded during the actions Hace tiempo que no te susurro… and The Whispering Cabin, carried out between 2021 and 2024. The secrets exist stored within the memory cards, but they will never be heard; they remain sealed. Here, the whisper is no longer sound but the possibility of sound, a compressed and mute intimacy. If in the car piece the noise persists without voice, in Secretos the voice exists without a horizon of listening.

 

In Muted Crash (2025) and the photographic series Ruido (2022), the acoustic element once again shifts toward the terrain of imagination. Laura Llaneli questions to what extent sonorities can exist without sounding. The objects seem to preserve an acoustic memory of their own. The plates suspend the expectation of impact; the photographs activate internal, subjective sounds, auditory memories that emerge while reading the image. Listening emerges from the accumulated experience of the viewer, from involuntary associations, from a collective resonance built through memory.

 

To hear the sea in a seashell (2026) brings the idea of curvature into a literal and physical form. Sound itself exists through curved waves. The seashell filters and equalizes the environment, returning it transformed by its own structure and emphasizing certain frequencies. The artist translates these frequencies into chords and musical notes, attempting to fit free and diffuse resonances into a system of tuned conventions. The gesture contains a constant tension between drift and containment, between that which escapes and the attempt to organize it. The seashell thus functions as an acoustic body where both forces coexist.

 

In this sense, the exhibition does not propose only listening to the works, but also to what surrounds them, hearing as well what exists inside ourselves: the silenced noise, the distant echo in the background. Through text, object, and absence, Llaneli summons an idea of containment, referring to sound without the need to generate it. She also reflects on what it means to produce more noise in a present already saturated with it. Like a curve, the works invite us to divert perception. CURVATURA proposes inhabiting this deviation. Listening to what barely vibrates, to what still remains.