Before the very first note, there is an image: a sleeve on the turntable, a face, a colour, a promise. For Diego Gil, an author and music columnist from the Basque Country, that image has never been mere packaging: it is already photography. From Les 12 vies de Bowie to the great album covers that shaped our culture, he spends his life listening with his eyes. Within the Argia collective, he leads a project that reflects who he is: Sound and Vision.
Diego Gil is not a photographer. And that is precisely what makes him unique within Argia. Where the other members see the world through a lens, he listens to it, then looks in the sound for what can be seen. An author and music columnist, he works at the crossroads of cultural history, music and artistic imagination: his raw material is records, concerts, sleeves, and everything they tell us about an era.
His territory starts here, on the coast. For him, Hendaye is not a backdrop but a root.
« I've had Hendaye in me since childhood », he says. « I've sometimes moved away, but I've always come back. »
He says he can no longer do without its views, its very particular way of life, and above all what he calls « this crossroads of cultures and perspectives ». It could be a description of Argia as a whole: a collective born on the border, where languages, countries and ways of seeing meet.
From this anchor he explores music not as mere entertainment, but as a cultural and social phenomenon: a way of reading societies through their sounds.
Diego Gil's work as an author reveals an obsession: telling the story of music through its contexts, places and margins. He has written a history of the Basques in Bordeaux, a dive into the city as a rock destination, and a title for the Discogonie collection, devoted to dissecting a cult album. From one book to the next, the thread is the same: behind every song there is a geography, a community, a human story. For him, music is never alone: it always reveals something bigger.
© Photo credit: Diego Gil © Photo credit: Adam Bielawski (Photobra), CC BY-SA 3.0
In January 2026 his latest book was published, Les 12 vies de Bowie (Umami). Choosing David Bowie is no accident for anyone interested in the link between sound and image. Bowie is the chameleon, the artist of constant reinvention, who never stopped changing his face along with his music. With him, every album is a metamorphosis, every sleeve a new character. It's hard to imagine a better embodiment of the idea that image and sound go hand in hand.
It is no coincidence that Bowie is also at the heart of Crossed Perspectives #1: the first edition will set Diego's book in dialogue with a screening of the film Moonage Daydream, extending this reflection on the musical image onto the big screen.
This is probably where Diego Gil's thinking is most personal. For him, the record sleeve is much more than commercial packaging: it is the first image we receive of a piece of music, before we even hear it. An interface between artist and audience, which became an art form in its own right from the late 1940s.
His thinking goes beyond aesthetics. The sleeve, he says, also reveals a society's tensions: he points out, for example, how Black jazz artists were for a long time absent, visually, from their own records. Finally, it is a meeting place between musicians, photographers and graphic designers, where photography plays a central role. And in the age of streaming, when music is reduced to a thumbnail on a screen, going back to the large format of vinyl means giving the image back all its immersive power.
« Going back to the original format of the sleeve, its scale and its physicality, puts the image back into that fundamental dialogue between sound and vision. »
It would be incomplete to reduce Diego Gil to his books. He moves from one medium to another with rare curiosity. He has been heard as a columnist on several cultural radio stations; he made a short film, Lignes de vie, selected for the Centre Pompidou's « Mon Œil » programme; an audiobook-manifesto, La République des Éclaireurs; and even song lyrics written for a band.
This ease in moving between writing, radio, image and sound is exactly what he brings to Argia: a perspective that refuses to be confined to any one discipline and connects what others keep apart.
He came to the collective, as often happens, through encounters and conversations. Diego already knew Arnaud, and their many discussions about his photography collective project sparked his curiosity.
« Through the conversations and ideas we shared, the desire to build something together came naturally », he says, « not without a few interesting debates ».
Meeting the other members, he found the same wish to share and build together. He says he is still « in a phase of discovery »: a humility that says a lot about his relationship with the collective.
That is where Sound and Vision was born, the project he is leading for Crossed Perspectives #1. The idea comes from a long-standing fascination with album covers, a subject he had never had the chance to write about. « When a photography collective knocks on your door to talk about photography and its relationship with music, I jumped at the chance to fill that gap », he smiles. His aim: to step outside the strict field of music and take a detour that lets him talk about us too.
« I wanted to step outside the field of music itself and take a detour, not only to talk about music but also about us. In this dialogue between musical storytelling and photography, we discover our history, our own nature. »
In practice, Sound and Vision will take the form of a talk on the history of the record sleeve and a display of thirty-six framed vinyl records: music made visible, literally. From 31 July to 2 August 2026, at the Gaztelu Market Hall in Hendaye.
Meet Diego Gil from 31 July to 2 August at the Gaztelu Market Hall, Hendaye: talk, exhibition and vinyl display, free entry.
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