Asturias Circle
Semana del Arte de Asturias
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
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