José Luis Espejo (1983, Spain) works as a researcher, curator, and teacher on the relations between art and the culture of listening. He habitually works with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and was one of the co-founders in 2011 of the RRS, the museum’s web radio station. Since 2015, he has worked as a curator at major art centers like the Reina Sofía itself, where he has been in charge of the Live Arts musical programming since 2017, as well as for Donostia-San Sebastián European Capital of Culture 2016, where he co-curated a series of site-specific sound installations, and for Madrid City Council’s CentroCentro, where he was in charge of the musical programming and the anthological exhibition CHARIVARIA, reviewed in the press as “a fundamental referent”. Among his main publications is Escucha, por favor (Please listen), a compilation of 13 texts on sound for recent art, published by EXITLibris in 2019. His podcasts and sound design works have been heard on RRS, Matadero Madrid, Hots! Radio, at the 2021 Shanghai Biennial, at the Performa Biennial in New York in 2022, and shortly at the 2023 Architecture Biennale in Venice. He currently combines his work as curator and podcaster with teaching at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, and he is completing his thesis, a deep time study on whale fat as food and as a technical model for early modern lighting and for the design of submarine sonar systems.

Image credits: courtesy of the contributor