Spiral of Time – Plaça dels Àngels – MACBA

From 10 July 2025 to 11 January 2026 you can listen to Spiral of Time from the museum’s exhibition space. A site-specific work that, since July 2024, has been recording the ambient sounds of Plaça dels Àngels, constructing a sonic and temporal narrative of this space. The sound installation is also available online on this same page.

Sound is intangible and ephemeral, yet it can be one of the most defining characteristics of the places it inhabits. Spiral of Time is a site-specific work created by artist, composer, and researcher Edwin van der Heide (Hilversum, 1970) that explores sound and its relationship with space and time.

Installed on the façade of MACBA’s Research and Documentation Centre, a microphone setup has been recording the ambient sounds of the Plaça dels Àngels since July 17, 2024, and will continue to do so until July 2027. The resulting sonic archive, organized by time intervals, offers multiple ways of understanding the idiosyncrasies of the museum’s immediate surroundings through cyclical sound patterns shaped by both natural rhythms and human activity. This archive constructs a sonic portrait in which patterns—often imperceptible in real time—are revealed through sounds captured across different moments.

Presented in dialogue with recordings from the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, produced in collaboration with scientists from the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) and the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), the work invites listeners to engage with the artist’s long-term research on city soundscapes and experiments in “natural radio” that bring a nuanced understanding of human and non-human habitats through their vibrations.

The Spiral of Time project explores how listening can shape environments, connect different sonic zones, and modulate sonic-spatial reality. Spiral of Time uses a web-based interface that offers unique ways to navigate through the recordings at different speeds, with time visually represented as a spiral, providing an intuitive overview of hours, days, weeks, months, or years.

By choosing a specific path through the spiral, users can perceive and discover new relationships between sounds and time that are unique to the site’s context.

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_{Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.}

artist

Edwin van der Heide

Edwin van der Heide is an artist, composer and researcher in the field of sound, space and interaction. He extends musical composition and musical language into spatial, interactive and interdisciplinary directions. His work comprises installations, performances and environments. The audience is often located in the middle of the work and challenged to actively explore and interact with the artwork.

He has presented his work at renown museums, festivals, galleries and music venues as SMAK - Ghent, Ars Electronica Festival – Linz, Stedelijk Museum – Amsterdam, V2_’s DEAF - Rotterdam, ICC – Tokyo, NAMOC – Beijing, Transmediale – Berlin, SONAR – Barcelona, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, SFMOMA, FILE – Brazil, MAXXI – Rome, NMMCA – Seoul, SONAMBIENTE – Berlin, Reina Sofia Museum - Madrid, ZKM – Karlsruhe, Art Basel Parcours Night and Donaueschinger Musiktage.

Besides running his own studio he is part-time lecturer and researcher at Leiden University, involved in both the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) including the Media Technology MSc programme, and the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA). From 1995 till 2016 he was a lecturer at, and later also head (2014-2016) of, the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Conservatoire and Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He was Edgard Varèse guest professor at the Technische Universität Berlin (2009) and won the Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Award 2009 for his entire body of work. He was an invited artist and guest professor at Le Fresnoy, studio des arts contemporain in France for the year 2011-2012 and guest lecturer in the Master Contemporary Arts Practice of the HKB, Bern University of the Arts in 2019.