Mercurio, 2025
Mercurio is a sound installation and performance built around a suspended metal structure, contact microphones, and ten portable radios distributed throughout the exhibition space. During the performance, I activate the structure with simple objects such as combs, drumsticks, and wires. Its vibrations are picked up by contact microphones and transmitted through FM radio, allowing the sound produced in one place to appear from different points in the room.
The radios are different models and play at different volumes, so the signal does not sound exactly the same from each one. Distance, reception, and the presence of people in the space introduce further variations and interference. I became interested in making these normally invisible conditions perceptible: the radio signal has no visible body, but it can fill a room, be interrupted, distorted, or changed by what surrounds it.
A telescopic antenna is moved toward, away from, and sometimes directly against the metal, producing different tones of interference while I change the tuning of the radios. At the same time, I carry another radio connected to a digital stethoscope placed against my throat. My voice enters the system as a distorted signal and mixes with the sounds produced by the radios and the structure.
The title refers to Mercury, the messenger who carries information from one place to another. I was interested in imagining the messenger as something that does not simply deliver information intact, but keeps or transforms part of it along the way. In the work, every transmission produces a change: vibration becomes an electrical signal, the signal becomes radio transmission, transmission becomes sound again, and interference enters at every stage. What has no visible body becomes audible through the traces it leaves behind.