Information

I am a tireless listener and researcher. What was regarded by my teachers, and by my family, as an early case of attention deficit, has become an absurd capacity for finding unlikely associations: a glass flask with an LP, a comic sketch with the cultural studies, a recipe with a concert. Everything seems important or worthy of building up a broad knowledge without prejudice. In this spirit, I organize concerts and some exhibitions; I produce podcasts and research in a free (and also academic) manner the relationships between art and the culture of listening. I have participated in self-organized projects that I am frankly proud about such as Mediateletipos, and Ursonate Fanzine; and I have co-commissioned projects such as The Listening Observatory, CHARIVARIA or Archipelago. Currently I am working in the Public Programs and the Radio of the Museo Reina Sofía. Moreover, I have studied History of Art in several universities, and, something which I have enjoyed enormously and still manages to move me—it is me, not too long a student, who teaches on Studies of Listening at the Carlos III University of Madrid.

I started publishing in the Internet before social networks and online platforms ruined everything. At the beginning, it was in a blogspot (which I then renovated as WordPress) under the name of The Ratzinger Times. By 2017 I began to post on Mediateletipos.net, an online publication also in blog format devoted to the diffusion of aural culture, sound art, audiovisual activism, and “new media” creation. It was there that I turned my first analysis on acoustic legislation, listening culture or Sound Studies. At the same time, I began to participate in Ursonate Fanzine, a publication on sound art and the cultures of aurality, which I coordinated with Oscar Martín up until issue 00000004. More than ten years later, these remain the projects I am the most proud of.

As part of Mediateletipos, I was invited to design the Radio of the Museo Reina Sofía, a project where Mediateletipos, as a group, did not end up participating, though, thanks to Olga Sevillano, it grew into RRS. I have channeled through that platform some of my most personal investigations such as Cárcel de Oro [Gilded Cage] or Only That Which Moves Exists, sonic-verbal essays which stand between the history of art and the cultural studies, all of which can be heard in this site.

Since 2017, I am in charge of the music programming of Artes en Vivo, also at the Museo Reina Sofía, where I work towards an alternative exploration of the modes of modern listening, be it in its aural architecture, its attention models or its eurocentered and patrilineal genealogy. It is not easy to work for a cultural institution with the word “queen” in its name. It reminds me too much of the motto “Sólo Madrid es la corte” [“Only Madrid holds court”]. It is not easy to forget that “Contemporary Art” is an environment inhabited, in many cases, by a certain frivolity and an elitist economy. I sometimes think that this and other European museums try to show a modern image of the country they work for, while at the same time serving monarchies and oligarchies in whitewashing their real goal — keeping their privileges resorting, if necessary, to violence.

However (and this is a huge HOWEVER), I believe that this tool of propaganda is, like many other institutions, a public service. In public institutions some people work for the greater good. In my particular case, I would like to think that I work there to promote the joys of learning and a healthy curiosity. To that end I work hard to produce an elaborate, enriching and enjoyable program, because, to paraphrase the Pizarros, “we must share and delight.” And so I want to believe in the public function of institutions: in public health, public education, in libraries, which make historically- and politically-relevant knowledge available to the public. In my case, I want to bring them closer to the world through listening.

I like to work with other people. Within the programming of the MNCARS, I program Archipelago with Rubén Coll and I have collaborated with other people in the conception of events such as Agnès Pe, Mattin, Jesús Jara, Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Susana Jiménez Carmona or Sarah Rasines. I have also co-curated alongside Mikel R. Nieto and Xabier Erkizia at The Listening Observatory, for DSS2016, and, alongside Andrea Zarza, CHARIVARIA, another of the fondest projects in my catalog, for the CentroCentro Cibeles between 2016 and 2017.

Besides the texts I published in The Ratzinger Times, Mediateletipos, or Ursonate (some rather naive but always hopeful). I have published texts for several books, and I have edited alongside the rest of Audiolab the audio-book Donostia Noise, from the workshop of the same name. In 2019 I released my first book, Escucha, por favor.13 textos sobre sonido para el arte reciente [Listen, please. 13 texts about sound in recent art], taking the baton from José Manuel Costa, in this selection of texts which cover more than a hundred years about sound in art, and deals with figures and geographies not always accounted for in regular monographs.

Furthermore, thanks to my texts in Mediateletipos I began to participate in the MA of Musical Industries and Sound Studies at the Carlos III University of Madrid, where I soon started to coordinate the Sound Studies Module, and where I now teach. In this university I am also coursing a PhD thesis with the text Cetacean Media. An Archeology of Audiovisual Media Conceived or Fabricated from the Fat of Cetaceans.

Though my work up to this point has centered on the relationship between art and listening culture, I am currently giving greater priority to many other connections. This is why I am developing a research project inside and outside the academic context under the title of Evil is Always Human, with which I am attempting to study the impact of the fat of some cetacean animals in audiovisual human culture during early modernity. In this website you may access some information on these subjects, such as the sessions on listening that I put together for institutions such as TEA in Tenerife (2021), CentroCentro Cibeles in Madrid (2022). And—we’ll see!—I hope it turns into a PhD thesis soon enough.