18 MAR – 14 APR 2026

IN-SONORA is a platform dedicated to sound and interactive creation that serves as a space for visibility, support and encounter for artists working at the intersections of sound, technology and perceptual experience. Through its festival, specific projects and virtual platforms, IN-SONORA activates an ecosystem that promotes the circulation of works, critical exchange and connection between artists and diverse audiences, understanding sound practice as a territory in constant transformation and dialogue with the present.

Passive Resistance places interactivity in an uncomfortable position, deliberately contrary to the usual logic of technological devices. Instead of responding to gestures, movements or actions, Alberto Bernal’s installation is activated—and transformed—through the prolonged immobility of those who contemplate it. It is not about doing, but about holding. About remaining. About resisting.

In this new collaboration between OBLIQUO and the IN-SONORA festival, Alberto Bernal’s exhibition presents a piece conceived for the long term, developed between 2013 and 2026, which proposes a temporary experience that is open and radically dependent on the commitment of the body and the space where it is exhibited. The work invites—or rather incites—viewers to stand in front of the projected images and accept a form of presence that does not produce immediate effects. Only persistence actively brings about progressive changes in image and sound, in a process that can last seconds or extend indefinitely, depending on each person’s ability to sustain their own stillness.

This reversal of the interactive paradigm turns the viewer into a silent agent, whose action is neither visible nor spectacular, but decisive. The work thus shifts attention from the event to time, from reaction to waiting, and from control to a form of exposure shared between body, technology and duration. In that interval, the installation not only changes, but also challenges: what does it mean to remain? What transforms when we do nothing?

From this poetics of delay, Passive Resistance connects with a genealogy of socio-political practices based on non-action as a form of disruption. Thoreau’s civil disobedience, Gandhi’s strategies of resistance, and Rosa Parks’s foundational gesture appear here not as illustrative references, but as resonances activated from the present. Similarly, the work dialogues with contemporary forms of protest that use the immobile body as a tool for critical visibility: the standing protests in Hong Kong or the die-ins of the Black Lives Matter movement, among others.

Without resorting to explicit discourse, the installation articulates a constant tension between aesthetic perception and political reading, between sensory experience and collective consciousness. This intermediate space—fragile, uncomfortable, and productive—is also the territory in which Alberto Bernal’s practice is inscribed: a work situated on the border between concert, installation, performance, and video art, which sustainably explores the fissures between sound, image, word, and everyday experience. His international career, developed between Europe, America and Asia, as well as his pedagogical and theoretical activity, reinforce a practice in which creation, thought and mediation form part of the same continuum.

Curated by Mario Gutiérrez Cru and supported by PROYECTOR, this solo exhibition once again emphasises one of OBLIQUO’s central themes: the presentation of works that do not seek immediate spectacle, but rather require attention, time and critical engagement on the part of the viewer. Passive Resistance does not offer a comfortable or instantaneous experience; instead, it proposes a way of being that, today more than ever, is deeply political.

OBLIQUO
Calle Valencia 17, Madrid.
Monday to Sunday from 9am to 9pm.