What remains after the celebration ends?

Arqueoloxía da festa traces the acoustic sediments of an abandoned festival site in Portomouro (Val do Dubra). Using sound as our primary archaeological tool, this project reveals how landscapes hold temporal traces—layers of human celebration gradually negotiated with the more-than-human world.

We approach this transitional space as an active ecosystem, employing sonic archaeology to uncover multiple interwoven temporal layers in dynamic interaction. Over twelve months, we combined archaeological and ethnographic methods with diverse field recording practices (including extended techniques), visual documentation, and oral histories shared by local residents. This multimodal approach allowed us to expose how different temporalities—geological, human, and ecological—actively transform each other.

Upon entering, visitors are met with a video loop generated through LiDAR scanning—a remote sensing technology that reveals the site’s three-dimensional structure through laser pulses. This technological ‘excavation’ slowly renders Portomouro visible, mapping the precise geometry of decay and transformation.

Four-channel audio envelops visitors in Portomouro’s polyphonic temporalities. The soundscape shifts between recognizable field recordings—birdsong, passing traffic, running water—and more abstract sonic textures sensed through extended sensing techniques: contact microphones pressed against deteriorating concrete recorded structural vibrations; geophones buried in the soil revealed subsurface movement; hydrophones submerged in the Tambre River captured aquatic life reclaiming human-altered waterways. VLF antennas and an electromagnetic sensor picked up multiple electromagnetic signals, while a bat detector sonified these animals’ movements. These entangled, coexisting sounds slowly drift and merge, with electromagnetic interference patterns transforming into rhythmic phrases and wind on metal forming a soft, evolving drone.

Layered with this sonic archaeology, video footage documents the site’s transformation throughout our year of observation. The imagery reveals the remarkable agency of non-human forces: how vegetation rapidly softens architectural edges, how fungi forge complex relationships with human materials, how seasonal flooding reshapes boundaries between built and natural space.

Furthermore, physical artefacts retrieved from the site—old soda and beer bottles, fragments of various fabrics and plastics that echo as traces of past celebrations—ground the experience in material evidence. These objects do not merely illustrate decay; they demonstrate how matter itself becomes a form of memory storage.

Arqueoloxía da festa asks what we can learn by listening carefully to abandoned places. The work embraces 'positive destruction'—how ruination dissolves original forms while generating new ones. As structures decay, their acoustic properties transform. Collapsed roofs create new resonating chambers. Vegetation introduces fresh acoustic materials. Bird colonies deposit sonic sediment through their calls becoming part of the site’s evolving identity.

Sites such as Portomouro mark complex negotiations between tradition and change and human design and ecological agency. By treating sound as archaeological evidence, we discover that abandonment is not absence—it is transformation.

The installation suggests that every landscape holds multiple temporalities simultaneously. Learning to hear these layered rhythms might offer new ways of understanding our relationships with place, memory and the more-than-human world that continuously reshapes the spaces we seek to control.

Arqueoloxía da festa demonstrates how listening can excavate the invisible layers of place, revealing how landscapes accumulate meaning through acoustic processes. In an era of accelerating environmental and social change, this sonic archaeology offers methodologies that work through patient accumulation rather than immediate revelation.

Exhibition credits

Concept Matilde Meireles and Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros

Project assistant, interviews and voice-over Fátima Rodríguez-Porto

Additional voice-over: Laura Ferradás

Drone images Rubén Vuelta-Santín

Multispectral camera images Juan Torrejón-Valdelomar

LiDAR Marta Crespo-Fernández, Pastor Fábrega-Álvarez

Prospección arqueolóxica Laura Muñoz-Encinar, Thibault Saintenoy, Marta Crespo-Fernández, Cristina Inicio-del-Río, Marta DelMastro-Ochoa, Fátima Rodríguez-Porto

Graphic design Laboratorio Numax

Production XEITO | Laboratorio de creación etnográfica, Instituto de Ciencias do Patrimonio (INCIPIT, CSIC) with the support of the Xunta de Galicia through the artistic residencies program of the Fundación Cidade da Cultura de Galicia

Acknowledgements Residents of Portomouro, Iván Barcia, Val do Dubra council

Funding Axencia Galega de Innovación (Ref. IN607D-2022-05) and Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación e Universidades/Axencia Estatal de Investigacion/10.13039/501100011033 (Ref. PID2020-118696RB-I00)

Research