In the waiting room of the sanctuary: Luis Lecea Romera’s “antecâmara”
What is the role of a sanctuary? Can an object embody destruction and resistance? If the soil had a voice, what would it say? Luis Lecea Romera talks to FIBER about “Antecâmara", the installation he created in the context of the RE:SOURCE residency.
Beyond the safety of the sanctuary
An “antecâmara” is the room that precedes the important room, the room where you wait, where you wander, in anticipation of an event or an encounter. Sometimes, what is found in this room is of greater importance.
“Antecâmara” is the name the artist Luis Lecea Romera gave to the sound art installation he created as part of the second part of FIBER’s RE:SOURCE residency. Titled “The Sanctuary” and realised in collaboration with Semibreve Festival, the residency explores the contradictions of the Gerês-Xurés Transboundary Biosphere Reserve, located in the North Region of Portugal and the Autonomous Community of Galicia in Spain.
In this instance, the “antecâmara” represents Serra da Cabreira, the mountain range where Lecea Romera conducted his research, just outside the reserve’s borders. “I work from the perimetre of the park. It’s funny because the whole context of the proposal was that I would be inside the natural reserve,” he explains.
The word “sanctuary” carries complex, contested connotations. It provides refuge, comfort, and safety. Often, what lies beyond or is excluded to safeguard what’s inside reveals more than what’s within. “I was not interested in what the park protects, but rather what it is protected from,” says Lecea Romera. During multiple trips to the reserve between October and December 2023, his research unearthed the equivocal presence of the eucalyptus tree in the area.
The Gerês-Xurés reserve stretches across A Raia (“the Stripe”), the border between Galicia and Portugal, and it is one of the few areas where eucalyptus plantation is limited. “The Spain-Portugal border is intriguing,” notes Lecea Romera, “remaining unchanged except for a small village passing between the two.”
Both countries’ recent histories are shaped by legacies of military dictatorships, which prioritised establishing national industries to achieve economic independence, leading to the dominance of the eucalyptus tree. Under the fascist Francoist and Salazarist regimes, it symbolised economic prosperity, fuelling the national paper industries.
Eucalyptus seeds first arrived in Galicia over 160 years ago, introduced by Rosendo Salvado, a missionary from the village of Tui, on the northern bank of the Minho river. These evergreen trees became a symbol of economic prosperity on both sides of the border. Despite its unfitness for construction, eucalyptus wood gained widespread use in paper-making cellulose production and for draining wetlands.
Responsible for disrupting entire ecosystems, yet unregulated by the paper industry, eucalyptus was instrumentalised by both regimes “as a geoengineering tool within an ideological project of totalitarian subjugation and profitable exploitation of the landscape,” says Lecea Romera. In the eucalyptus tree, conservation and exploitation of natural heritage bleed into each other.
A pyrophyte species, eucalyptus has evolved mechanisms to thrive during forest fires. These traits, although they make sense in Tasmania, its natural habitat, in Southern Europe they contribute to catastrophic wildfires. “By creating the fire, they perish, but they also sprout,” says Lecea Romera. “They create the conditions of their own destruction and their own rebirth.”
In 1989, in the valley of Lila in Portugal, 800 people assembled to destroy 200 hectares of eucalyptus, in what became one of the largest environmental protests in the country’s history. The destruction of trees seems to be at odds with environmental activism, which is focused on preservation. Yet eucalyptus trees themselves occupy a contradictory role in the Portuguese landscape, as they are held responsible for exacerbating the country’s devastating wildfire problem.
Lecea Romera’s installation alludes to the tools of action used by the Brigadas Deseucaliptizadoras (Anti-Eucalyptus Brigades) as grassroots expressions of cross-border environmental resistance against the degradation of rural areas and a lingering authoritarian legacy. “One of the key turning points of the project was when I discovered the brigades,” reveals Lecea Romera. This initiative plays an important role in combatting eucalyptisation, preserving the local flora, and restoring biodiversity in the area: “They organise themselves and go into the forest to eradicate the trees. Their strategies are highly sophisticated, which I found fascinating. I like to think of these brigades as acts of antifascist resistance against the authoritarian inheritance of Spain and Portugal.”
Exploring loss and decay at the thresholds of audibility and visibility
Luis Lecea Romera is an artist, architect, and piano-trained composer based between Madrid and Amsterdam. He describes himself as “an architect who doesn’t like to build new things” and as “a musician who doesn’t like to improvise”, crafting his practice “at the periphery of both disciplines” — two disciplines which have often been at odds with each other.
“As an architect, I always refrain from conceiving buildings from scratch, the same way that as a jazz pianist, I had a certain shyness at throwing notes out there when it came to improvising,” he says. “In that sense, my work often departs from pre-existances to recontextualise their elements akin to composing ‘arrangements’ in music or creating ‘contrafacts’ within jazz’.”
Lecea Romera’s work examines the deterioration, decomposition, and decay of territories and landscapes as an instrument to reveal the complexities and historical and sociopolitical contradictions. This involves the manipulation of material and aural spaces through through situated uses of audio-spatial technologies in installations, compositions, and performances.
The meaning of decay is twofold, as he explains: “In the context of acoustic sound, decay signals the manner in which a sound ceases, indicating the time that it takes to die out, the rate at which it fades into silence. For this amount of time, past beyond its moment of formation, sound exists as reflections — reverberations — in a shadowy transition, gradually disappearing from the audible spectrum to the point of complete extinction of any audible trace.”
But decay has another meaning altogether. “As a material state and process, decay describes trajectories from life to death as downward succession in time of unstable equilibriums,” he says.
“In my works I often aim at tracing these trajectories and identify hovering points in this fall within deteriorating matters, architectures, and landscapes, such as decomposing nuclear waste, an offline data centre inside a former courthouse, or a graveyard covered by a volcanic eruption.” — Luis Lecea Romera
“Antecâmara” also serves as the convergence point for Lecea Romera’s two primary disciplines: music and architecture. “Within a charged landscape that echoes the ghosts of the Iberian dictatorships, the work is situated in my practice at the intersection of acoustic geography and instrument building,” he says.
In the context of the residency, Lecea Romera traces the lineage of the wildfires that every year sweep through the Iberian Peninsula back to the Iberian dictatorial regimes of the 20th century. “Antecâmara” has been a process of unblackboxing some dynamics and political inertias that we still suffer on both sides of the border,” he says.
The installation stands as Lecea Romera’s most sculptural creation yet and serves as a pivotal example of Lecea Romera’s methodology. It also marks the first outcome of his artistic exploration to become untethered from its site-specificity.
Consisting of nine chainsaw guide bars, it is arranged into three sets, each consisting of three bars. “Underground recordings induce sound into repurposed chainsaw blades, experimenting with the acoustic qualities of industrially designed objects”, he explains. These blades produce identical sounds, vibrating steadily, like chords.
By inducing these vibrations into the chainsaw components, the piece functions as an ideophone — an instrument that generates sound through its own vibration, utilising its entire body as a resonating material.
“Each blade has a resonant frequency. And so when a group of three is reproducing the same sound, each of them is also emitting another sound, kind of like a harmony,” says Lecea Romera. “I didn’t understand at first why I had such a fascination with this, and then I understood: this is how a piano works.” The resulting composition invites reflection on the contradictions of decay and preservation.
In this process, the chainsaw, like the eucalyptus tree, became a fascinating object, one with surprising abilities and imbued with contradiction. “A chainsaw is a very practical tool and has a clear set of instructions on how it’s supposed to behave,” says Lecea Romera. “Actually my first entry point to the brigades was their extensive YouTube channel in which they teach you how to employ this tool to eliminate the trees.”
During the days of the residency, severe storms and heavy rain alerts shadowed Lecea Romera as he ventured alongside visual artist Kyulim Kim, his collaborator in documenting the project, just beyond the borders of the Gerês-Xurés Reserve. “What we encountered when we walked on the scorched earth was that the ground became more porous than regular healthy soil, and a lot of water trickled down the first layer, and was now running some centimetres below the surface”.
Using contact microphones and geophones, Lecea Romera recorded these textures and used them as compositional elements. In the installation, which was presented at gnration in Braga, Lecea Romera deploys a sound composition based on these field recordings, gathered on locations where eucalyptus forests were razed by fires, inferring the close relationship between forest fires and eucalyptus plantations. The vibrations in those recordings form the basis of the composition.
A big part of Lecea Romera’s work deals with vibrations as a way to convey meaning. “The chainsaw, as an object that vibrates, poses an interesting contradiction to the silence of the sanctuary,” he says. “It exists partly because of this violent act of cutting. And also for me it is a symbol of the brigades, a symbol of their resistance against the heritage of fascism.”
The earth as witness: A non-extractive approach to field recording
Lecea Romera’s compositions often begin as field recordings, an act which he approaches with a non-extractive mindset. “For me this translates into not having a rigid plan on what I will precisely record. I don’t engage with the practice of accessing a space or a landscape with the purpose of pulling or mining something out of it,” he says. “The act of recording for me is an opportunity for an intimate interaction, an exercise of listening-with rather than just listening-to.”
This exercise of “listening-with” became especially relevant during the field recording process. “Initially I arrived at the field focused on the dryness and texture of the fire-razed earth, and was not expecting water to become part of my materials for composing,” says Lecea Romera. “How to listen and attune to a site is an important part of my process.”
Though in the past he didn’t dare to manipulate his recordings, preferring at the time to treat them more like samples in order to preserve their integrity (“Manipulating the recordings would be a moral gesture, like I’m masking something,” he says), this later changed. Over time, he became less interested in simply presenting the recordings in their original state.
“I allowed myself to manipulate more of all these materials I gather and began to employ them as musical tools,” he says, describing a process in which he would constantly zoom in and out from the meaning of their origin. This process also relieves them from having to do the weightlifting of “scientifically” supporting the research or engendering an overarching moral narrative, something which he argues is increasingly demanded of sound art.
At its core, “Antecâmara” isn’t meant to act as a definitive or moralistic statement on the climate emergency. Instead, it offers an exploration of transformation, decay, and regeneration and their underlying historical and sociopolitical complexities, rooted in mutual support, partnership, and connection.
“A big part of this project and this experience has to do with personal relationships,” says Lecea Romera, for whom the significance of collaboration — in the form of conversations with Rafael, the director of Semibreve, scouting wildfire sites with his brother Zé, or even receiving assistance from their brother-in-law Paulo to tow their car from the mud, and working alongside Kyulim in the field — is just as significant as the final output. “Kyu is not only a fantastic artist but also a dear friend. Being on the field with Kyu is synonymous with being ready for action while being patient and showing care for our work and for each other.”
“Antecâmara” by Luis Lecea Romera will be on show during the Neighbouring Frequencies exhibition, which will take place at de Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, between May 29 and June 16 as part of FIBER Festival 2024: Outer/Body. Neighbouring Frequencies shines a light on the rich, interconnected history, present, and future of sound art in Belgium and the Netherlands. It is a collaboration between FIBER, Belgian international arts house STUK, and Flemish cultural centre de Brakke Grond.
Interview and text: Eleni Maragkou
