LED lamps, mirrors, loudspeakers, sound and electric cables, audio DVD.

May to June 2018, Dining Room of the Aveiro Museum / Santa Joana, Aveiro. Commissioned by Carlos Veríssimo for Criatech.

We worked in a convent’s 15th-century dining room, an austere yet richly decorated utilitarian space destined to nourish bodies while giving spiritual sustenance through listening to sacred texts read during the meals. This room has a functional layout that includes several tables and a bell mounted near the entrance. The walls are covered in tiles, creating a very reflective acoustic space. We tried to go beyond exploring the acoustics and to also use the room’s spiritual resonances, working from ideas such as introspection and hierarchy. We developed the installation along with the tabletops, mounting lights, loudspeakers, and mirrors that reflected these sounds and light to the tabletops. Visual reflections, much as echoes, contribute to creating strange relationships in the experience of the installation. Reflections reveal the space in unexpected ways because they bring us impressions of something we are not consciously looking at and almost inevitably distort these images and the spaces where they are found, bringing them to us in a different light. We had previously used reflective surfaces and materials, but this was the first time that mirrors became an element in a piece. The sound objects included readings of numbers, an evocation of the numbers that we found carved on the tables — and that marked the places assigned to nuns — and the numbers of the scriptures read during meals.