SHAPES MADE OF LIVING FOG

SHAPES MADE OF LIVING FOG is a visual arts project grounded in contemporary printmaking. Its content includes an exhibition designed for the temporary exhibition rooms of the Côa Museum, promoting an intervention/connection with the interior architectural space and the exterior landscape, through sculptural works and large-scale xylographic installations (wood matrices and their prints) created by printmakers Samuel Ornelas and Ana Torrie, accompanied by sound design co-created with composer and harpist Angélica Salvi and actress and director Sara Barros Leitão, along with a live performance on the opening day and an open conversation with all the project artists on the closing day.

We have inherited existence in a game of colorful spots and engravings on rocks, apparitions, the most varied images of our rooted passages. It’s as if these images already belonged to us or were waiting for us to turn them into light again. These are images that emerge and are attributed meanings as we immerse ourselves in time. They never cease to reveal. It is interesting to notice in this revelation the potential to be “discovered” in light and darkness, where luminosity sometimes hides, and darkness sometimes reveals—our existence. These projections constructed by intersecting lines, carved on a surface, also reveal the location of our dreams. These natural orders, perhaps, are what led us to this encounter. Far from a merely visual, common approach, we presume that the engravings born in this project intend the intersection of artistic expressions in the symbiosis of the wills and voices of a premeditated past and future, intertwining us in a “time capsule,” present, now!

The sound design, authored by Angélica Salvi, harpist and composer, and Sara Barros Leitão, author and actress, establishes a conceptual link between the exhibition SHAPES MADE OF LIVING FOG and the pedestrian route between the city of Vila Nova de Foz Côa and the Côa Museum. The sound piece has a duration corresponding to this walk and is available in digital format right here on the project’s website, with open access to the public. It can also be accessed through a QR Code at exhibition room inside the museum and at the starting (Fonte Nova) and finishing (Museum’s viewpoint next to the Olive Tree) points of the proposed route [Google Maps].

We encourage the public to walk from the city center to the museum, in an immersive experience accompanied by the sound design prepared by the authors. We recommend using headphones connected to your mobile phone. During the opening of the temporary exhibition (August 10), the artists will be performing an excerpt from the work.

Although the piece is presented as independent from the other works on display, it was conceived in dialogue with them. Rooted in the ideas of walking and landscape, it aims to create a connection between space, viewer/listener, and time. It is a unique and dematerialized artistic object, which can be listened to in different contexts and geographies. In this way, the inspirations of this place, its heritage, and the surrounding nature can be experienced anywhere in the world, at any time. We hope that the intermittent points of light from the past and present keep remaining and spreading, and that Foz Côa and its cultural heritage can reach its descendants.