Spiral of Time, sound installation by Edwin van der Heide at MACBA

MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de BarcelonaRaval

Spiral of Time – Plaça dels Àngels – MACBA

Now showing10 July 2025 – 17 January 2027€15

Edwin van der Heide's site-specific sound work, recording the ambient sounds of Plaça dels Àngels since July 2024 and playing them back as a shifting sonic portrait of the square.

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On now All of October 2026

Every hour, a microphone on the façade of MACBA's Research and Documentation Centre records one minute of Plaça dels Àngels: voices, cleaning trucks, skateboards, thunder, the occasional cricket or helicopter. It has done so since July 2024 and will until July 2027.

You move through that archive on a web interface that draws time as a spiral. Play back an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year at different speeds, and patterns you can't hear in real time come through. Recordings from the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, made with scientists from the Federal University of Amazonas, sit alongside the square. Skaters have filmed this square for decades; this is the version where the cleaning truck gets equal billing.

It's one sound work you steer yourself, with nothing to look at but the spiral. Listen in the museum's exhibition space on a general MACBA ticket (free for under-16s and Thursday to Saturday from 6pm), or online on the work's MACBA page. It runs to 17 January 2027.

Look for

The spiral
Time is drawn as a spiral on screen: choose a path through it and hear an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year of the square at different speeds.
The square's own soundtrack
One-minute recordings taken on the hour, day and night: voices, cleaning trucks, skateboards, thunder, and now and then a cricket or a helicopter.
The Amazon recordings
Sound from the forest around the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus, one of the world's largest urban forest fragments, recorded since February 2025 and heard alongside Barcelona.