Luis Adaro Exhibition Centre, Gijón · Client: Caja Rural de Asturias · Event: 69th Asturias International Trade Fair · 4 August 2026
The brief
Caja Rural de Asturias presented its new pavilion at the Luis Adaro Exhibition Centre to 150 guests. This was not a seated event: the presentation happened on the move, walking through the three floors of the building, with the audience standing and circulating.
Solving it with conventional PA would have meant installing equipment zone by zone and competing in volume with the noise of a trade fair open and running all around. We approached it the other way round: no speakers.
How it was solved
Each guest received a set of wireless headphones on arrival. The voice of those leading the tour reached the ear directly, so your position within the group stopped mattering: you could stop at a particular area, fall behind or drift away, and still hear just as clearly.
With 150 people standing, that changes the dynamic considerably. Nobody has to crowd around the speaker or raise their voice, and the group moves more freely between floors. Each person also adjusts their own listening level.
The noise of the fair stays outside the headphones. And in the other direction, the event adds no sound level to the surrounding exhibition space.
Installation
The entire set-up ran independently of the venue’s mains supply: no connections, no generator and no power cabling across the space. There were no fixings on the building either, which had opened that very week. Set-up and strike left no trace.
It is the same autonomous technology we use in caves or botanical gardens, where there is no infrastructure to draw on. Here the advantage was being able to cover an itinerary across three floors without touching the building.
A note
We had been developing this format in artistic contexts — concerts, dance, interventions in natural settings. It works just as well at institutional events, and for similar reasons: sound stops imposing itself on the space and starts accompanying whoever walks through it.