Joaquina Salgado hides a score inside luminous eggs

The music in Joaquina Salgado's flooded videogame has to be found. It sits in loops inside luminous eggs scattered across a low-definition landscape, and the water between them slows every step. That's Nostalgia es feedback expandido, which opened Oct. 9 in the gallery at Artlab in Buenos Aires as part of the eighth MUTEK.AR (Oct. 7 to 11). Artlab's reel announcing the show says the water imposes "a slowness made of delays and returns".

It isn't a new work. As Nostalgia Is the Extended Feedback, it closed SOMA Art Berlin's Becoming Future series in December 2025, running on an iMac and upright LCD screens and steered with a trackball set into a sculpted sea creature. Salgado's project page calls it a "slow-game installation" and credits two programmers, a steel fabricator, three voices, and sound by Tatiana Heuman, whose loops are the things you're hunting. So the score is the collectible: you put the soundtrack together by finding it.

Salgado is an Argentine artist based in Berlin, and water is the long-running material. "I work a lot with underwater worlds, very dreamlike," the artist told Revista G7 in 2022. It makes the terrain, which is what Gareth Damian Martin saw in Pol Clarissou's To West in these pages in 2016: "it is the landscape which dictates the speed of a train." Swap the train for a pair of legs and the desert for a flood.

The Buenos Aires run is bracketed by two other dates: a show of Salgado's games in a working cybercafe on Oct. 1, and MUTEK.AR's dome program at the Planetario on Oct. 11, with Qoa. We flagged Salgado in August among the residents at Sybil in Berlin. Artlab says it opens a new show every month and hasn't posted a closing date for this one, so check before you go.