Subtropics Brings Immersive Sound Art, Expanded Cinema, and Experimental Radio to Deering Estate
The landmark Miami festival returns with Audible Fields, a five-Sunday series presenting more than 22 local and international artists in a newly expanded dialogue between sound, moving image, performance, and architectural space.
MIAMI, FL — July 2026 — Nearly four decades after composer, sound artist, and curator Gustavo Matamoros founded the Subtropics Festival, the influential platform for experimental sound returns with Subtropics: Audible Fields at Deering Estate, an immersive series unfolding across five Sundays in July, August, and September 2026.
Presented at the Deering Estate Theater and organized by Matamoros, a Deering Estate artist-in-residence and programming partner, the series brings together more than 22 artists from Miami and abroad. Through sound performance, radio art, expanded cinema, projection, archival film, and audiovisual experimentation, Audible Fields transforms the theater into an active environment where listening becomes spatial, physical, and deeply perceptual.
The series opens on Sunday, July 26, from 4 to 8 p.m., with Unfinished Visions: Silent Film & Sightless Radio, a program exploring fragmentation, montage, historical displacement, and transmission across time.
Admission is free, with advance RSVP through Eventbrite required.
Unfinished Visions: Silent Film & Sightless Radio
At the center of the opening program is a multiscreen presentation of surviving materials associated with Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished cinematic project, ¡Que Viva México! Reconfigured through archival fragments and related documentary materials, the work emerges not as a conventional reconstruction but as an evolving visual constellation shaped by interruption, historical movement, and reinterpretation.
Eisenstein, one of the most influential filmmakers and theorists of the 20th century, transformed cinematic language through his radical approach to montage. His films, including Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible, established editing as more than a narrative tool: montage became a generator of rhythm, emotion, conflict, and intellectual meaning. His unfinished Mexican project remains one of cinema’s most compelling meditations on image, culture, ritual, and national identity.
The materials presented at Deering Estate were restored and reconstructed through the work of film historian, archivist, and curator Bruce Posner, whose scholarship has been central to the preservation and renewed circulation of avant-garde and experimental cinema. Posner lived and worked in Miami for many years, contributing significantly to the city’s experimental film culture.
For this presentation, Deering Estate resident artist Freddy Jouwayed develops the multiscreen realization and spatial projection design. Jouwayed’s approach translates archival cinema into an immersive environment responsive to the architecture and technical systems of the theater. Rather than presenting the film as a fixed historical object, the installation allows the images to inhabit the room as fragments of memory—appearing, overlapping, disappearing, and returning across multiple visual surfaces.
The program also features If Everyone Waits by award-winning radio and audio artist Gregory Whitehead. Composed for voice, instruments, radio noise, and very low frequency transmissions, the 11-minute-and-11-second work draws upon text adapted from a historical 1942 leaflet.
Whitehead’s composition unfolds as a layered acoustic field in which speech, signal, interference, and silence continuously reshape one another. The voice functions simultaneously as a carrier of meaning and as raw sonic material, while interruptions and unstable transmissions reveal the fragility of communication itself.
Together, the two works create a dialogue between incomplete images and elusive signals—between cinema that survives through fragments and radio that exists through transmission, disappearance, and reception.
A Festival That Changed Miami’s Listening Culture
Subtropics was established by Gustavo Matamoros in 1989, at a moment when sound art was only beginning to receive broader institutional attention. Over the following decades, the festival became an essential platform for experimental composers, intermedia artists, improvisers, radio artists, and interdisciplinary performers.
Born in Caracas and active in South Florida since 1979, Matamoros has played a foundational role in Miami’s experimental arts community. His practice encompasses composition, sound installation, performance, environmental listening, curatorial work, and the creation of site-responsive acoustic environments.
Matamoros approaches sound as a sculptural and spatial material. Just as a painter works with pigment or a sculptor with clay, he works with vibration, resonance, distance, duration, and the act of listening.
“There’s no mystery to it,” Matamoros explains. “It’s art made from sound.”
His curatorial philosophy does not attempt to define sound art through academic explanation. Instead, it offers audiences direct encounters with sonic experiences that may alter their awareness of space, architecture, technology, memory, and the body.
Since beginning his residency at Deering Estate in 2021, Matamoros has helped transform a previously underused room into a functioning theater and experimental presentation space. The 2026 edition marks the fifth year that Subtropics programming has been presented in the renovated venue.
Matamoros is currently in residence at Florida International University’s i360 XR Theater and at the Deering Estate Theater, with support from a Knight Arts Challenge award.
Where Sound Meets Image
Although sound remains the conceptual foundation of Subtropics, Audible Fields expands into visual and spatial forms. Film, projection, radio, moving image, performance, and exhibition design become active collaborators rather than secondary accompaniments.
Deering Estate resident artists Freddy Jouwayed and Barron Sherer contribute visual, technical, and projection-based support throughout the series. Their involvement reflects the festival’s collaborative structure, in which the boundaries between artist, curator, technician, performer, and audience are intentionally fluid.
Among the participating artists and contributors are sound collective jamJamStrawberry, radio artist Gregory Whitehead, musicians and artists Barbara Held and Richard Garet, composer Julio Roloff, and artist Olivia Block.
Barcelona-based Held and South Florida– and New York–based Garet will present work during Audible Systems: Held / Garet + Matamoros on Sunday, September 13. Their performance will bring together flute, electronic sound, audiovisual composition, and moving imagery.
The collective jamJamStrawberry will present a new work titled Strawberry Sweets, accompanied by projections and visual support from Sherer and Jouwayed. Rather than asking audiences to remain passive, the festival encourages active attention and an openness to unfamiliar relationships among performer, image, technology, and sound.
Subtropics: Audible Fields — 2026 Schedule
Sundays, 4–8 p.m.
July 26
August 2
August 16
September 13
September 27
Location:
Deering Estate Theater
16701 SW 72nd Avenue
Palmetto Bay, Florida
The July 26 presentation will take place in the Deering Estate Visitor Center Theater, 7220 SW 168th Street, Palmetto Bay, Florida 33157.
Link: Admission: Free
Advance RSVP through Eventbrite is required for the July 26 program and encouraged for the complete series.
About Gustavo Matamoros
Gustavo Matamoros is a Miami-based intermedia artist, composer, curator, and organizer working across experimental music, sound installation, radio, performance, and interdisciplinary media. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, he has been active in South Florida since 1979 and is the founding artistic director of the Subtropics Festival. His practice explores listening as a spatial, environmental, and perceptual experience through immersive and site-responsive works.
About Freddy Jouwayed
Freddy Jouwayed is a Miami-based multimedia artist, exhibition designer, and resident artist at Deering Estate. His practice encompasses projection environments, spatial image design, installation, and multimedia exhibition development. For Audible Fields, he leads the multiscreen realization of ¡Que Viva México! materials and contributes projection design across the series.
About Gregory Whitehead
Gregory Whitehead is an internationally recognized radio artist, audio artist, and text-sound poet. His work has been presented by the BBC, Radio France, Deutschlandradio, ABC Australia, NPR, and other major international broadcasters. Since the 1980s, he has been a central figure in the resurgence of radio art, investigating voice, transmission, interruption, linguistic instability, and the poetics of broadcast media.
About Deering Estate
Deering Estate is a 21st-century house museum, cultural institution, ecological field station, and nationally recognized historic landmark. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the property is owned by the State of Florida and managed by the Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces Department.
Designated as one of Miami-Dade County’s seven Heritage Parks, Deering Estate plays an important role in preserving the region’s cultural history, natural environment, and archaeological legacy while offering exhibitions, performances, educational programs, artist residencies, and recreational experiences.
Cultural arts programming at Deering Estate is made possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, and the Deering Estate Foundation, Inc. Programming in the Deering Estate Theater is also supported by The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation.
About the Deering Estate Foundation
Established in 1989, the Deering Estate Foundation, Inc. is a community-based charitable 501(c)(3) Florida corporation and the philanthropic partner of Deering Estate.
The foundation supports the preservation of Charles Deering’s historic 1920s property, its cultural and educational programming, archaeological and scientific initiatives, and the conservation of the diverse flora, fauna, and eight native ecosystems found across its 450 acres. Through memberships, signature events, corporate partnerships, and distinctive cultural experiences, the foundation helps ensure the continued vitality of this important American heritage site.
Accessibility
To request materials in an accessible format, sign-language interpretation, or other accommodations for a Miami-Dade County-sponsored program, contact the Miami-Dade Parks ADA Coordinator at 305-755-7848 or [email protected] at least five days before the event. TTY users may call 711 through the Florida Relay Service.
Event Information
Subtropics: Audible Fields at Deering Estate
Deering Estate Theater
16701 SW 72nd Avenue
Palmetto Bay, FL
305-235-1668
Free admission; advance RSVP via Eventbrite
