Muu Blanco: Multimedia Artist

After living and working in Miami for a decade, multimedia artist Muu Blanco wanted to create a project for his first solo exhibition that would integrate nature in an urban environment, something which he feels truly represents the city. 

“I feel like the city that I live in, Miami, it’s an urbanized island, and a huge fringe of nature, where plants are majestic.” 

Muu takes a lot of inspiration from the way that 18th and 19th century naturalists would have documented their experiences with nature. They were limited to things like painting and music, but they were still able to relate to and represent the natural world. 

His project documents ten different landscapes and plays them all simultaneously in order to create a layered soundscape that captures a combination of different experiences in the city’s environment and represents the diversity of native plant life. 

“This diversity that exists at a migratory level, it’s the same for plants. When you drive to the Everglades, you don’t find just one type of tree, one type of vegetation, you find many different species and they are all mixed.” 

The process is a meditative experience. Muu finds lush spots in parks and sits for a full hour in silence, just recording the sounds of the wind and fauna. 

While Muu grew up loving both plants and art, when he finally went to art school, he found that the institution was too limiting. Eventually he left and took a different route to hone his artistry. Through that, he always included his philosophies about the everlasting power of nature. 

“I always included my thoughts about nature…which consists in a kind of positivism that nothing will disappear. They always say that we are destroying nature, but nature will always emerge in any way, even through the cleft of two blocks of concrete.”

Filmed and edited by Jacopo Fantastichini.

Produced by Laura Christian.

Additional footage by Oscar Lobo SVC.

Music by Muu Blanco.