Through Requiem for the Insects, Oswaldo Maciá transforms the gallery into an immersive sensory environment where sound, sculpture, and historical references converge in an elegy for disappearing insect populations.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, Oswaldo Maciá transforms the gallery into a fully immersive sensory environment with Requiem for the Insects.
Born in Cartagena de Indias and working between Santa Fe and London, Maciá creates sculpture through sound and smell, expanding the experience of art beyond what can be seen.
In Requiem for the Insects, the gallery itself becomes part of the work.
Requiem for the Insects
The installation surrounds visitors with a sculptural arrangement of glass megaphones descending in a spiral from the ceiling.
Speakers concealed within the megaphones produce a layered composition that unfolds throughout the space.
Rather than encountering sound from a single source, visitors experience it spatially.
The architecture, sculptural forms, and movement of sound work together, turning listening into a physical encounter.
A 16-Channel Sonic Environment
The composition unfolds across 16 audio channels, combining recordings of insects with the sharp, disruptive sound of shattering glass.
These two sonic elements create a striking contrast.
The sounds of insects evoke living ecosystems—the buzzing, chirping, and movement that often exist in the background of everyday life.
Shattering glass interrupts that environment.
The rupture introduces fragility and destruction into the composition, transforming the soundscape into something increasingly unsettling.
Sculpting With Sound
Maciá’s practice challenges conventional definitions of sculpture.
Instead of relying exclusively on solid materials and visible forms, he uses sound and smell to shape how visitors perceive and move through space.
Sound becomes almost architectural.
It surrounds the body, changes depending on where someone stands, and creates an environment that cannot be understood from a single viewpoint.
The visitor must experience the work over time.
In this sense, Requiem for the Insects is not simply something to observe. It is something to enter, hear, and physically experience.
Natural History and Observation
Behind the suspended installation are paintings inspired by 18th-century naturalist field sketches.
These works introduce another layer to the installation.
Naturalist drawings historically served as tools for observing, documenting, and categorizing the natural world.
Placed alongside a contemporary work concerned with insect extinction, that tradition of documentation takes on a more urgent meaning.
The paintings evoke a history of carefully recording species while the sound installation confronts viewers with the possibility of those species disappearing.
When a Soundscape Disappears
The title Requiem for the Insects frames the installation as an act of mourning.
A requiem traditionally commemorates the dead. Here, Maciá directs that language toward insect life and the ecological consequences of its disappearance.
The work encourages visitors to consider extinction not only through what disappears visually, but through what disappears sonically.
What happens when a familiar buzzing, chirping, or humming is no longer present?
What does an ecosystem sound like after those voices disappear?
The possibility of silence becomes one of the installation’s most powerful ideas.
Oswaldo Maciá at the Whitney Biennial 2026
Within the Whitney Biennial 2026, Requiem for the Insects becomes both elegy and warning.
Through glass, sound, painting, and spatial experience, Maciá draws attention to forms of life that can easily be overlooked despite their essential presence within larger ecological systems.
The work asks audiences to listen closely to something that may be disappearing.
Oswaldo Maciá’s Requiem for the Insects transforms the Whitney gallery into a space of listening and remembrance, confronting insect extinction through an immersive environment where the sounds of life collide with rupture—and where the possibility of their disappearance is ultimately measured by silence.
Explore the Complete Tarik Talk Whitney Biennial 2026 Series
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