Alvaro Barrington

To Be Heard, 2026
Photo: Django van Ardenne

“This installation comes from a memory of the living rooms of my grandmother, mother, and aunts. Sofas covered in plastic. Usually empty during the week, set up by members of my family to host each other most often on Sundays. It was the room where we all gathered as family, neighbors came by and listened to the radio or watched TV. It was where we gathered after church, after weddings, after funerals. It was where private conversations were had. As I reflect on those days, it was a room created to keep the family together, created for each of us to be heard. Hearing unlike listening happens to you, it happens to your body. You hear a drum, you hear a car crash, hearing happens in your body.” –Alvaro Barrington.

Entering the structure, the visitor is invited to sit and allow themselves to hear the world. There is no programmed audio. Instead, what is heard is the rustling of leaves, distant footsteps, one’s own thoughts. The shack carries the quiet gravity of a chapel: a built space that frames attention without prescribing it. Distinctly architectural, the work mediates between nature and shelter, solitude and collectivity. It asks whether hearing, as a deeper attunement to environment and the self, might reshape how memory is formed and proposes that sharing and building space requires learning how to hear within it. If listening is selective, hearing is relational. In cultivating the capacity to hear, Barrington suggests, we might create stronger grounds from which to shape personal and collective memory.

Listen in the audiotour