“It is much more difficult to kill a ghost than a reality.”
Virginia Woolf
With the subtle and poetic idea that there are sounds that are not heard with the ear, but with memory, we enter the universe of Fito Conesa (Cartagena, 1980), an artist who has made voice, narrative, and sonic space the core of a practice that moves between installation, video, and performance. His work investigates the mechanisms of collective memory construction and the ways in which power —political, economic, or cultural— shapes the narratives we inhabit.
Conesa often works with documentary materials, testimonies, and archives that he transforms into poetic devices capable of activating critical listening. His installations do not impose a closed discourse, but instead propose an immersive experience in which language is fragmented, repeated, or displaced, generating a space of echo and resonance. The viewer is not a passive receiver, but a body that moves through a field of tensions and meanings.
Sound is central to his language. The voice —sung, spoken, or recorded— becomes a plastic material capable of constructing invisible architecture. In this convergence between sound and space, Conesa reveals what is often left outside official narratives: minor histories, shared fragilities, buried memories. His work thus articulates a poetics of vulnerability that does not renounce critical lucidity.
In the Hall of Mirrors of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Fito Conesa’s installation establishes an especially intense dialogue with the musical and performative history of the space. The piece activates the site from a contemporary perspective and introduces a layer of meaning that questions the relationship with memory, between voice and power. The reflection of the mirrors multiplies the presence of bodies and amplifies the perception of sound, turning the architecture into a symbolic resonance chamber.
Thus, the work does not merely occupy the space, but transforms it into an expanded listening experience. In this encounter between sound art and heritage, Conesa invites us to reconsider what it means to listen in a time saturated with images and discourse. The installation ultimately becomes an exercise in attention: an invitation to inhabit silence as a space for thought and to recognize that every voice, even the most fragile, can alter the way we remember.