Recording and listening session for Petit Bardo
La Petite Mort de la Menthe (2026) by Ferran Lega Llados
The project is an action reflecting on life, death and the technological translation of biological processes. The work begins with a simple and violent gesture: the recent cutting of a mint plant. From that inaugural moment, the plant organism begins an irreversible transformation. What normally remains hidden from human perception—electrical variations, physiological changes and the progressive loss of vitality—is captured through bioconductivity sensors and converted into sound, data and MIDI events. The plant ceases to be merely living matter and becomes an instrument, a score and an archive of its own disappearance.
The title, La Petite Mort de la Menthe (The Little Death of the Mint), establishes a dialogue between different meanings of the French expression petite mort, traditionally associated with an experience of suspension and momentary loss of consciousness. In the project, the expression shifts into the vegetal realm to name a slow and silent passage. The aim is not to represent death as an instantaneous event, but as a process. The work observes the interval between the cut and death: the ambiguous time in which life persists even as it fades.
The live performance emphasises the temporal and ritual dimension of the piece. The audience shares with the plant the duration of its transformation, witnessing an experience in which changes are minimal, almost imperceptible, yet constant. In opposition to contemporary acceleration, the work proposes sustained attention to a slow phenomenon, forcing us to reconsider the temporal scales through which we usually understand life. The spectator does not contemplate a spectacle of death, but enters into a prolonged act of listening to vulnerability. Death ceases to be an endpoint and becomes a sensitive, audible and shared process.
“There is a sound-producing biotic component, present in almost every environment, that tends to be overlooked: plants.”
Francisco López, Environmental Sound Matter (1998)
An event forming part of Mikel R. Nieto’s Horizontal Listening research project, in collaboration with La Panera (Lleida) and with support from the Spanish Ministry of Culture through the “Public Grants for the Creation, Research and Production of Artistic Projects in Residence” (2025).
Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan — Funded by the European Union — Next Generation EU. Government of Spain, Ministry of Culture.
