At MAAT — Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s from here to ear v.26 occupies a gallery with roughly twenty electric guitars, amplified and tuned, and about one hundred zebra finches who use them as furniture. Curated by François Quintin, it runs July 8 – August 31, 2026, and it is the artist’s first exhibition in Portugal.
Visitors walk in among the birds. The birds perch, hop, take off, and land — on strings, on pickups, on the necks of instruments wired into amplifiers — and every one of those small decisions becomes sound. There is no score, no trigger system, no sensor array. The composition is what a hundred finches happen to do while you are standing in the room.
Why the twenty-sixth version is not a repeat
The “v.26” in the title is the important part. Boursier-Mougenot has been staging this work since the late 1990s, and each realization is materially different — the instrumental system, the room’s acoustics, the architecture, the specific flock. The piece isn’t a fixed object that tours; it’s a set of conditions that produces a different composition every time it’s installed. That is a fundamentally generative practice, arrived at with living performers rather than code: the artist designs the system and the constraints, then relinquishes the output.
For a site that spends most of its time on algorithmic and procedural work, it’s a useful reminder that the interesting part of generative art was never the algorithm. It was the decision to build a machine whose results you don’t control — and to accept whatever it gives you as the work.
The unglamorous infrastructure
MAAT is unusually direct about the practicalities, which is to its credit. The one hundred finches (fifty male, fifty female) were bred in Portugal by a specialist breeder; a dedicated team handles daily feeding, cleaning, and health monitoring; environmental conditions in the gallery are controlled throughout the run; and the birds return to their breeder when the exhibition closes. The zebra finch was chosen for being highly social and adaptable to new environments.
Work with living participants has a long history of critical argument attached to it, and from here to ear has drawn its share — instrumentalization of animals is a fair question to put to a piece that literally turns birds into instrumentalists. Boursier-Mougenot’s counter is embedded in the staging: the birds are free to ignore the guitars entirely, and much of the time they do. What you hear is punctuated, sparse, unhurried — nothing like a performance, everything like a room.
What it sounds like
Amplified electric guitars respond to a landing finch with a low thump through the pickup, an accidental harmonic, a string ringing out for a while and then not. Over an hour it accumulates into something closer to a Feldman score than a jam: long silences, isolated events, an occasional flurry when the flock moves at once. The artist has described his practice as arranging sound structures in space like physical scores — “both random and perfectly controlled.”
Boursier-Mougenot, from Nice and based in Sète, has shown related work — including Clinamen, the floating-bowl piece, and Perturbations — at the Peabody Essex Museum, Park Avenue Armory, Bourse de Commerce, and SFMOMA. If you’re anywhere near Lisbon before the end of August, this is the one to catch: a permanent musical composition performed by an ensemble that has no idea it’s in a band.
Related Reading
- Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: from here to ear — MAAT
- Birds on guitars, in the zebra finch sound art of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot — CDM
- An immersive soundscape by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot on view at MAAT — Artdaily
- Zebra Finches Become a “Flock of Songwriters” in a Room Full of Electric Guitars — My Modern Met
- Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: from here to ear v.19 — this is tomorrow