Steel plates, construction clamps, loudspeakers, sound and electric cables.
August 2018, Portas do Ceo, Vila Nova de Cerveira. Commissioned by António Cabral Pinto for the 20th Artistic Biennial of Cerveira.
An installation over the banks of the Minho river, bordering Spain. Above the town, on a hill, lie the remains of a small chapel, fragments of its main wall and the door frame, a sight-seeing spot known as Portas do Ceo (Doors of Heaven). We worked with the remnants of the building, the landscape, sun, and wind, to create an installation intended to be experienced in proximity and from a distance. Reflecting the sun during the day and the moon and artificial lighting during the night, this piece was quite striking, even if at times it could seem hardly more than a flickering point in the distance. The installation accompanied the circadian rhythm, its construction featured steel plates mounted to the archway with construction clamps, creating a system that reacted to the winds in the hill and produced a dynamic and variable sound that was juxtaposed to a pre-recorded track, diffused at a significantly lower volume in the area surrounding the chapel. The landscape was reflected and distorted by the steel plates, and the introduction of a temporary soundmark transformed the soundscape. As reflected in its title, the piece used wind to create sound and visual effects — as it projected reflected light — while the pre-recorded sounds replayed winds captured in other spaces, bringing to this hill winds from the ocean, from deserts, and many other places.
