Zooxantela: Listening to Coral Bleaching at Mexico City Art Week
February 3–6, 2026
Casa de Representación del Gobierno de Quintana Roo
Av. Álvaro Obregón 161, Roma Norte, CDMX
Open to the public, Invitation only for events
During Mexico City Art Week 2026, Zooxantela will transform the Casa de Representación del Gobierno de Quintana Roo (office of the Government of the State of Quintana Roo) into an immersive, full-building installation exploring coral bleaching, symbiosis, and the fragile acoustic life of reefs.
Presented by Ocean World of Sound, the installation brings together sound, sculpture, scientific knowledge, and interactive art to create a space for deep listening and reflection on the Mesoamerican Reef, one of the world’s most biodiverse and most threatened coral systems. The installation includes interactive artworks, soundscapes, posters, educational materials, sculpture, drawings, photographs, a selection of art for sale, and a panel discussion on Tuesday, inviting dialogue across art, science, and conservation. Contact Ocean World of Sound to enquire about media and event invitations.
At the core of Zooxantela are soundscape works by composer and sound artist Heather Spence. Three are world premiers:
Symbiotic Fluid / Fluido Simbiótico
Decade old original cello improvisations, sampled (Zoom H4n)
Field recordings of bleaching corals in Puerto Morelos, sampled (Loggerhead Snap)
Reverberations
Symbiotic Fluid is a layered sonic meditation on coral reefs as living archives of time, memory, and interdependence. The work weaves together samples of decade-old original cello improvisations with samples of contemporary underwater recordings captured at bleaching coral sites in Puerto Morelos, Mexico (Parque Nacional Arrecife de Puerto Morelos).
Through sampling, reverberation, and recursive listening, the piece treats recording as a form of time travel; an act of listening backward. Past and present propagate together as the cello’s human gesture merges with the textures of stressed coral ecosystems, losing their color as they lose their symbiotic algae. Patterns emerge through guided encounters between sound sources, emphasizing both serendipity and fragility, and reveal the reef not as a silent victim but as an active, vocal presence.
The listener is immersed within a chamber of echoes where resilience and sadness coexist. Symbiotic Fluid invites deep listening to reef voices that persist, asking us to hear coral bleaching not only as ecological loss, but as a transformation in the sonic identity of the ocean itself, where something is ending, and something else is being born.
A Piece of Myself / Una Parte de Mí
Poetry, Underwater Eavesdropping, Overtone Singing, White Noise
A Piece of Myself is a call for empathy and listening, reminding us that coral stress is not abstract, but deeply personal. An intimate sonic poem, the work explores coral bleaching as a crisis of identity: when corals lose their symbiotic algae, what part of themselves disappears? Does their sense of self extend to their microbial partners, the reef community, or the planet they help sustain?
Human and nonhuman voices blur as poetry is fragmented, submerged, and reassembled. The piece begins with a clear “blue” noise: the rich, crackling, non-random textures of reef shrimp. Gradually, white noise is introduced, a spectral veil that both illuminates and erases, spanning all frequencies equally, masking detail without preference, indifferent to the patterns beneath. Unlike the reef’s complexly textured soundscape, white noise is inherently unnatural, unstructured, and indiscriminate, obscuring all in a culminating cresting wave.
The stark contrast between the recorded underwater soundscape and the intrusive density of white noise underscores the meaning in underwater dialogue, even in an alien language. Whispered decipherably human phrases float within this shifting field, appearing, echoing, and dissolving as the reef itself becomes obscured. Lines such as “I lost a piece of myself. Where’d you go?” and “Honor my bones / I’m a skeleton key / You’re not alone / Believe in me” frame the coral as both vulnerable and foundational, tracing an arc from vitality through disruption, and ultimately, a fragile persistence amid loss. Language surfaces and dissolves in tandem with environmental change, making coral grief hauntingly audible, relational, and mutable.
Breathing Negative Space / Respirando el Espacio Negativo
Port: Underwater breathing (H. Sapiens) Starboard: The absence of coral reef
Breathing Negative Space explores the subtraction of natural sound from artificial noise. With Broadband noise as a starting point, the shape of the voice of the reef was acoustically removed. The remains whisper in one ear, a rising and falling, as in the other ear with waves of breath, similar in scale yet unsynchronized. The reef is perceived through residue, marked by the metronome of life support in alien terrain.
Underwater, human hearing is ill suited for sound localization. Distance collapses. Front, back, up and down lose meaning. In Breathing Negative Space, humans are tasked to orient between absence and presence. The reef is present only through what is missing, so its voice is not heard directly, but inferred, traced as a hollow in noise. The work asks the listener to attend to that hollow, to treat absence as structure rather than loss. At the same time, human presence persists, uncoordinated. Through a subtle architecture carved by omission and measured by artifacts of human curiosity and technology, the practice of orientation becomes a responsibility to navigate toward understanding.
