Asturias Circle
Asturias Circle
Site-specific participatory sound installation
What do we lose when a story is forgotten?
Asturias Circle translates Council Circles into a participatory installation exploring collective wisdom, memory, and loss. Approaching Asturias as a newcomer, Carlota Santamaría takes listening as a way of learning from the region and its people.
Participation unfolds through three acts: offering, listening, and sharing. The Circle of Stories presents six recorded accounts in Spanish, English, and Asturianu, forming an intimate portrait of the region through individual lives.
Black-clay sound sculptures, stones from wild beaches, and powdered coal from Asturian mines connect these voices to the region’s coastal landscape and mining history.
At the center, El Cobijo (The Shelter), built from driftwood gathered along the Asturian coast, offers a place to contribute a story anonymously to a digital archive via a QR code. Over the ten-day exhibition, these contributions extend the circle from recorded testimony into a living archive.
The work asks how personal experience enters collective memory, and what it means to hold another person’s story against forgetting.
The invitation
What story would you like to share, good or bad, about something that happened to you in Asturias, changed your life in some way, and that you would not want to be forgotten?
Asturias Circle
Site-specific participatory sound installation
Materials: Black clay, beach stones, driftwood, mirrors, and powdered coal from Asturian mines
Audio: Six MP3 recordings of varying duration, in Spanish, English, and Asturianu
Components: El Cobijo (driftwood shelter), and participatory digital archive
Dimensions: 18m diameter
Activation: Ten days
Venue: Fábrica de Armas de la Vega, Oviedo, Spain
Exhibition: Semana Profesional del Arte de Oviedo
Island Circle
Island Circle — Mallorca
Site-specific participatory sound installation
Can collective wisdom emerge through a participatory art installation?
Island Circle translates Council Circles into a spatial exploration of collective wisdom through listening, reflection, and shared movement.
Seven mirrors with organic edges conceal speakers playing recorded personal stories. Participants encounter their own reflection while listening to another person's account, bringing self-perception into dialogue with another life.
Across English, Spanish, Mallorcan Catalan, and other languages, the work brings a shepherd's account into conversation with experiences of migration and lives connecting Mallorca to the Global South. Together, these voices form an intimate social portrait of the island, opening onto questions of belonging, memory, and what gives a life meaning.
Circles of lime powder mark each listening point. Carried underfoot as participants move between them, the powder traces their passage, gradually completing a larger circle over the three-day exhibition.
At its center, a sculpture combines ceramic, glass, a circular clay form, and fig-tree sticks arranged in a triangle balanced by two seashells. Its equilibrium gives material form to the relationship between the surrounding stories.
Inside a stone house, a chair beneath a fig tree and a QR code invite participants to contribute their own stories to a digital archive, extending the circle through further voices.
The invitation
What story would you like to share, good or bad, that happened to you on the island and changed your life in some way? Perhaps it could only have happened here, in Mallorca.
Island Circle — Mallorca.
Participatory sound installation
Mirrors, recorded voices, lime powder, ceramic, glass, fig-tree sticks, seashells, and digital archive
22m diameter· Three-day activation
