Performative walk with sound, light and video installations.
Os Passos em Volta – Trafaria is a performative route that encourages immersion in the details of the places it passes through by calling for silence, listening and a tactile perception of the world. It proposes a choreographic reading of the walk along a trajectory fragmented into small sections, to which fragments of sound and video are juxtaposed that trigger a reconfiguration of those places and reveal their relationships with an expanded space and temporality.
At a time when the various dimensions of life seem to be subordinated to a productivist regime, how can we think about the temporality of delay that the act of walking brings about? How do we experience this dilation of the present? In this time marked by the need for new things and the planned obsolescence of places and objects, how can we think about what lasts beyond its functional usefulness? How can attention to the qualities of obsolete spaces confront us with what reduces everything to its exchange value? Fragment, obsolescence, memory, uncertainty, openness to the future, how does a ruin enhance a renewed look at the present?
The incomplete remains of a wall or the broken pieces of stonework testify to the construction’s survival against the forces of destruction: the earthquake, the advance of waters, the siege of war, the nuclear threat and the devastation of capitalist innovation. These persistent fragments reveal their sheltering power. Os Passos em Volta – Trafaria is a performative walk along the Trafaria cliff in which the present is illuminated like a field of ruins. (Joana Braga)