Noves vies is an interactive installation by Valentina Gaia Lops that explores sound and language as embodied and shared experience. Commissioned by Temporals, a public art programme by the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, the work centres on a modified typewriter that captures and reactivates voices and sounds from its surrounding context.

The installation is developed through a process of site-specific mediation, engaging local communities in the collection of sonic fragments, personal narratives, and everyday expressions. These exchanges inform the work’s material, embedding it within the lived experience and memory of the territory.

Informed by synaesthetic perception—where sound can be experienced as touch—the typewriter is reconfigured as a listening device: a mechanism through which language becomes vibration, rhythm, and shared presence. Words are no longer fixed units of meaning, but material traces that can be felt, inhabited, and collectively reinterpreted.

Noves vies proposes listening as a situated and relational practice, opening a space to attune to what often remains unnoticed. By foregrounding the sonic dimension of everyday life, the work explores how meaning emerges through collective attention and how new forms of connection between body, space, and city can be rehearsed.

Exhibition History
Museu Arxiu Tomàs Balvey, Cardedeu (in progress)
Centre Cívic Joan Oliver – Pere Quart, Barcelona, 2025
Centre Cívic Convent de Sant Agustí, Barcelona, 2025
Centre Cívic Ateneu Fort Pienc, Barcelona, 2025