Artwork Description

Depth (2026) is a collaborative work by Guely Morató Loredo and Lara Ögel, whose practices first converged during a residency at Delfina Foundation in London in 2025. Their shared sensibility re-emerges in this multisensory installation, evoking an underwater realm in which fragile relationships between human and more-than-human worlds come into focus.

Visitors are invited to remove their shoes and enter an enclosed, darkened space. Inside, pale, bone-like sculptures rest close to the ground. Their textured surfaces suggest the accumulated traces of age, exposure and pressure. They recall shells, caves, bones and archaeological remains: forms that hover between the skeletons of prehistoric creatures and unknown organisms that resist easy identification.

Humble and vulnerable, these structures invite a moment of quiet attention. They shelter, endure and carry the traces of bodies under pressure. Two related forms suggest kinship and protection. A third functions simultaneously as relic and surface, its inscriptions derived from the migratory routes of marine animals and birds and translated into abstract incised lines that trace movement, return, displacement and survival.

Gradually, what emerges is not only the mysterious beauty of aquatic life, but also the violence imposed upon it.

As visitors attune themselves to the slow rhythm of the environment through deep listening, another layer becomes perceptible: a dense field of human-made underwater noise. The composition brings together scientific recordings, marine bioacoustics, whale vocalisations and ocean soundscapes with the acoustic presence of human infrastructures, including shipping traffic, sonar systems, offshore industries and the vast network of submarine communication cables that carries more than 95% of the world’s digital data across the ocean floor.

Messages, searches and digital interactions travel through these fibres. Their signals cross the depths alongside the lives and voices of marine ecosystems.

A haptic system of transducers carries low frequencies through the resonant body of the installation and into the visitor’s own body, activating a mode of listening that extends beyond ordinary hearing and is experienced through skin and bone. Underwater noise and the ecological damage it causes are as material as they are invisible: operating beyond the threshold of human perception while profoundly affecting the bodies and ecosystems they encounter.