Contemporânea

As I walk into farO on the day of the conference1 introducing the project RedSkyFalls (2019–2026), a crash echoes through the space. At the same time, Nu No2 reads the press release: “The foundations of thought must tremble, and with thought, everything else,” “we proclaim that the ground beneath what’s known has never been stable.”3 This is a passage from Survey on an S Wave, a manifesto by Marco Bene, whom Alexandre Estrela entrusted with the parallel programme accompanying the exhibition in Venice. Nu No continues to read, letting the pages fall one by one as he finishes them. Meanwhile, sudden sounds of telluric vibration follow one another, directly affecting a paper-clad loudspeaker camouflaged by a projection of plants in an aquarium. We are standing in front of Greenspeaker (2019).The thin paper gives way under the sonic vibrations and tears—a “green cry”4 more alive, after all, than the seemingly living background of an aquarium filter, where the image presents construction and artifice as natural evidence. Amid the sonic tremors and the ensuing lacerations of the paper, I have the feeling of being projected into the centre of the vortex, somewhere between the cyclonic energies of Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Factory Sirens (1922) and Hugo Ball’s fervent declarations at the Cabaret Voltaire—“It is not intended to be meaningless, nor gibberish, it reflects the lack of faith in the truth of the spoken wor[l]d,” he proclaimed in 1916, whilst other haphazard sounds echoed all around.5

To the left of the Church of Santa Isabel, in the Lisbon neighbourhood of Campo de Ourique, farO is thus the space chosen to give us a first glimpse of what will be on display in Venice between May and November. Housed in the church’s former cinema, which has been restored and converted into a sort of camera obscura, farO opens its doors to the public from time to time, offering a free programme of artistic and cultural events devised by Estrela and Ana Baliza. This programme, too, immerses us in the same vortex-like energy that took hold on the day RedSkyFalls was presented, ceaselessly interrogating the image in its refusal to bind itself to any previously defined idea. As in the cadavre exquis, each work chosen to be presented here ceases to function as a self-contained unit, instead acquiring meaning through the unforeseen relations it establishes with what precedes and follows it. The proposition implicit in farO’s programme, as in RedSkyFalls, does not therefore consist in a rejection of meaning, but above all in a refusal to settle it, with the image no longer conveying a predetermined meaning. Greenspeaker too reinforces this idea by showing us, through the recurring loud noises that distort our perception of the speeches taking place at the press conference, the absence of an authority that would compel us to assign the word a fixed meaning. If the word persists amid the noise, it too can no longer establish itself as a stable unit of meaning. This destabilisation—at once physical, perceptual, and epistemological—is not confined to the day of the presentation but extends throughout the project presented this year at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, a project that thus enables the vital contingency of meaning to be re-established. At a time when “everything is being flattened and homogenised,” to borrow Estrela’s words, RedSkyFalls responds in real time to planetary seismic activity with abyssal vibrations recurring in an endless, unpredictable cycle, reminding us how urgent it is to resist conventions.6

Upon our arrival in Venice, as we enter the Portuguese Pavilion—the former trading warehouse known as Fondaco Marcello—we find ourselves before Greenspeaker once again, now set against a vast screen that engulfs us in an image similar to many of those that still populate on our computer desktops today. We find ourselves before the scenic backdrop of RedSkyFalls, a large-scale projection of the macOS High Sierra (version 10.13) desktop landscape. The experience is akin to standing before Mount Corcoran (1876–1877) or one of Albert Bierstadt’s monumental paintings of Yosemite Valley, whose aesthetic of the sublime played a part in shaping the image of the American West as a territory open to expansion by white settlers, in keeping with the ideology of Manifest Destiny,7 which held that Americans were the “divinely ordained ‘masters’ of the continent.”8 In RedSkyFalls, a corporate image is appropriated: a bountiful, unoccupied landscape, a paradisiacal promise, with the screen now serving as the gateway to this seemingly natural destination. To use Estrela’s words, “Paradise was never simply ‘natural,’ but always shaped by historical projections.”9 In both cases, the landscape participates in an engineering of desire. Just as the territorial idealisation in Bierstadt’s paintings naturalises occupation, inscribing a sense of inevitability into the very construction of the landscape, so too does Apple’s corporate image draw on this visual rhetoric to transform the computer into a providential technological promise, an expanding horizon within an environment entirely at the user’s disposal. This ideology of desire is thus grounded in a promise of stability, sustaining the illusion that these landscapes are entirely visible, accessible, and available to be taken over. Yet RedSkyFalls introduces into the representation of the place precisely what is excluded from it: an external, unpredictable force that the image cannot fully master. By connecting his High Sierra image to real seismic activity, Estrela also interrupts a historical technology of seduction and conversion in which reproduction precedes and conditions the experience of the place.

With each tectonic movement a rumble is heard—bass improvisations by Miguel Abreu, aka Abras, played through a guitar distortion pedal—and we can see the landscape shift from spring to autumn and back again, whilst the thin paper membrane covering the Greenspeaker tears under the force of the sound. The stereotypical, immobile landscape responds, after all, to a geophysical, organic force. In a way, this destabilisation of what is, at first glance, beautiful, universal, fixed, absolute comes to us as a kind of resistance to the process of naturalisation that Roland Barthes identified in myth, which consists in transforming what is historically constructed and produced into seemingly natural certainties.10 The tremors introduce a constant break into this circuit, interrupting stabilisation, unsettling the immobility of the corporate image with provocative rumblings à la Barthes and abrupt shifts in tone, amidst the “the strange colours of dusk”11 and the piercing greens like omens from the sky. Estrela presents us with a “a small settling of scores”12 that no longer concerns Apple’s visual rhetoric alone, but a long history of corporate images, no less constitutive of myth, which reproduce similar forms of naturalisation, transforming places in the world into surfaces for projection and collective desire. Disruption and its unpredictability call REPRESENTATION itself into question:

The monumental landscape is not a real place but an idealised representation—imbued with desire—of that place, which, in fact, is also one of the most frequented “work environments” of the 21st century. There is, however, a trace that prevents us from entirely forgetting the digital interface: the cursor arrow remains motionless, enlarged to the scale of the projection, without the gesture that would usually cause it to traverse the image. As for the user, we do not know where they have gone. Only the symbol remains suspended over the landscape. A premonitory freeze. We are led to look around, as if we had been roused by a perceptual unease and the cursor’s stillness had restored our awareness of the surrounding space. It is then, on the side wall, that we see Barómetro (2024), a projection of a natural landscape upon which falls an iridescent glow caused by light entering the camera lens, a lens flare that inevitably contributes to the way the landscape presents itself to the eye.

Estrela responds with an invented scale, superimposed on the image, emphasising a correspondence of laterality—the lateral position of the projection and the lateral irruption of light into the landscape—which contaminates the visual asepsis of Apple’s desktop environment. This barometer, where the optical accident, the subverted scale, and seismic activity converge, reveals the image’s inability to stabilise as, with each tremor, its luminous landscape blurs, releasing “the scale of the brilliance it was meant to contain.”14 In attempting to make this glow measurable, the scale devised also seems to parody the conversion of an optical flaw into a visual convention of mainstream cinema. Appropriated as an aesthetic device – a manufactured imperfection – lens flare has become a visual artefact used in the construction of images that seek to seduce and elicit collective desire. Precisely at these moments of connection to the Earth, the tremor blurs the landscape, interrupting its capacity to function as an image of desire and, in doing so, suspending the idealisation the viewer might project onto it.

We continue to move through the space, never entirely at ease with the persistent sonic tremors, yet now seduced by the glow of the “chimeric sentinels”15 that form this complex ecosystem of digital beings. Estrela calls them Réplicas (2025–2026). They are based on his drawings, which Estrela transforms into animations whose organic quality of movement keeps life perpetually imminent, recalling both the fluidity and the kinetic ambiguity of Len Lye’s Tusalava (1929). The heart in the fly’s leg, the tail of the fish larva, and the rings of the earthworm form the basis of some of the movement patterns used to animate these chimeras, all of them derived from research carried out in behavioural neuroscience laboratories.16 Estrela utilises these data outside their original context, appropriating them purely as movement information, to animate the Réplicas using a combination of media, ranging from traditional animation to generative computer animation.

These peculiar creatures are projected onto six suspended aluminium plates, where they are also engraved, as if they were spectral doubles, in a sort of simulacral prophecy. When a seismic signal is detected, they stir and retreat into their engraved doubles. Before long, it becomes intuitively clear that the Réplicas, too, are responsive to telluric seismic activity. However, these beings incorporate only the movements drawn from animal datasets, not the electrosensory capacity of a real animal. In the end, they resemble incomplete beings, kinetic fragments of organisms. As we wander through the space, we sense that we have never merely been confronted with the question of the image as representation, but also with the image as a response system, that is, an image capable of receiving signals and producing variations in response to them. The sentinels are organisms converted into images or, as Baliza would say, “drawings converted into organisms,” biological movements transmuted into computational repertoires, beings that appear to be alive but are embedded within a generative system whose variability does not amount to autonomy, even though it operates on the basis of thousands of datasets. The Réplicas react to the world, but the responses they produce remain circumscribed by the conditions that precede and regulate their action.

Within RedSkyFalls, there is one sentinel in particular that catches my attention, the Réplica (Griddle Worm) (2026). It is a worm trapped in its own milieu—a grid of electrified lines from which it cannot escape. With every tremor, a discharge runs through it. In this system, the worm conducts electricity and, as such, the more current that passes through it, the more firmly it sticks to the lines along which it moves. It is hard to ignore the way this worm stretches out along the line that condemns it, at the very moment when its supposed capacity for mimetic camouflage fails—a capacity that, within an understanding of mimicry as adaptation, would be understood as a survival strategy. After all, we know they are sentinels run by code, yet before them we project something more… biological. The hallucination is such that, when animal behaviour is retrieved from the datasets, what is “most biological” about the worm seems more real to us than ever, as if Estrela had endowed it with what Henri Bergson identified as élan vital, the creative impulse inherent in life.17 It is here that fear makes us shudder, when, faced with an algorithmic system, we find ourselves projecting defensive capacities that are, in effect, strategies developed by living organisms to escape an aggressor. I cannot help but think of Roger Caillois and his prophecies concerning mimicry.

In Mimétisme et Psychasthénie Légendaire (1935), published in Minotaure, Caillois seeks to understand—primarily through the camouflage of insects—an organism’s desire to resemble the milieu18 that surrounds it.19 Caillois refuses to reduce animal mimicry to a purely defensive or adaptive function, observing that camouflage may prove useless or even fatal, as the organism becomes indistinguishable from that milieu and may lose precisely the difference that was meant to protect it.20 It is from this reversal—which he provocatively refers to as a “collective masochism”21—that Caillois finds in mimicry an attraction to the loss of difference, to invisibility, a condition of catalepsy in which life, in the grip of trance, life “takes a step backwards” (recule d’un degré).22 Without differentiation or autonomy, “a sort of instinct of renunciation” emerges, “a mode of reduced existence,” what he refers to as “the inertia of the élan vital, so to speak.”23 Caillois then extends this logic to psychasthenia, a concept he draws from Pierre Janet.24

It is this move that matters most here. Drawing on Janet’s observations of psychasthenia, Caillois describes the individual as no longer perceiving themselves as the origin of the coordinates, that is, as the point from which they situate themselves within and experience space, but instead as merely “one point among others,” in a process marked by a loss of mental and physical unity and by assimilation to space.25 As a result, the boundary between the individual and space weakens, the possibility of occupying a position of their own within it diminishes, and ultimately the individual loses their autonomy. Caillois thus recognises in psychasthenia a psychological form of assimilation to space that extends the logic of assimilation to the milieu already identified in animal mimicry. But, after all, what does this have to do with RedSkyFalls?

Again, I see a flash of the worm stretching out along the line, dissolving into the background that shelters it during the cataclysm, and I am struck by its tendency to vanish from view. Much as Caillois had described regarding mimicry, the worm itself seems to be absorbed by the compositional structure, swallowed up in visual indifferentiation. In turn, this loss of an autonomous position within the milieu it occupies finds an operational counterpart in its inability to alter the repertoire that regulates its behaviour. In the face of the earthquake, its singular rhythms are no longer its own. The sentinels are not, after all, autonomous centres of behaviour, but entities whose responses are parameterised by the system and triggered by the Earth’s activity. Their repeated pauses are not death itself, but a simulacrum of death in which the supposedly defensive response coincides with the evidence that they are deprived of agency. While Rosa Eidelpes, reflecting on Caillois’s theory, reminds us that “Man is no longer the centre of the universe,”26 RedSkyFalls likewise displaces any claim to centrality on the part of the artificial ecosystem, since the coordinates that guide and activate the system itself lie outside it and not under its control.

It is in this sense that the griddle worm takes mimicry beyond mere formal resemblance, revealing a weakening of its distinction from, and autonomy within, its milieu. In Réplicas, however, this decline in differentiation does not lead, as already noted, to death, but to a repeated suspension of activity determined by an external force. What is revealing here is that the apparently defensive response cannot develop into flight or any other form of action. The loss of differentiation thus finds its limit in the very inability to act freely.

These so-called sentinels survive as images, with no biology beyond what they are configured to reproduce. In a biting inversion, they are unable to escape their milieu and deprived of what, in a living organism, might transform the perception of danger into flight. Like the mouse cursor frozen over the macOS High Sierra landscape, the Réplicas (fruit-fly) (2026)—once traversing the surface of the aluminium plate as if searching for an exit—now remains motionless, and in that immobility every trace left by its labyrinthine movement disappears.28 What has become of the ancestral intelligence of fear that Charles Darwin himself described? If “the frightened man at first stands like a statue motionless and breathless,” as he wrote, for the most part—provided his heart does not stop—this is only a momentary interruption of movement, a recognition of the threat in the face of danger that anticipates flight.29 It is precisely this relationship between immobility and flight that runs through the research of neuroscientist Marta Moita, who examines in depth how animals respond to fear, with particular attention to their defensive behavioural mechanisms.

Moita’s studies were, in fact, decisive for the works in which Estrela explores the perception of threat. Currently working with Drosophila melanogaster, better known as the fruit fly, Moita and her team have shown that, when faced with a threat, the fly may either flee or freeze, with this response depending, in part, on the speed at which it is moving at the moment it detects the danger. Further research from her laboratory  has also shown that this apparent immobility does not imply an absence of physiological activity. During freezing, a small muscular structure in the tibia pulses rhythmically, and this activity increases before the fly begins to move again, suggesting that, even while motionless, the body is already preparing to resume movement.30 If, in this sense, and as the studies show, freezing is not merely an inability to act, but a defensive response with an internal dynamic potentially oriented towards subsequent action, then the Réplicas interrupt this logic exactly at the point where the suspension could turn into action. They detect, signal, become overexcited, fall still, and return to their baseline state. The issue, therefore, does not lie in freezing as an absence of action, but in its inability to give way to flight beyond the system’s operational conditions. Although it retains an appearance of life, the Réplicas (fruit-fly) remains circumscribed by these conditions, capable of reacting to the stimulus, but without the capacity to convert that reaction into behaviour external to its programmatic reality. It is here that the disappearance of that ancestral intelligence of fear becomes apparent—one that, in a living organism, could transform suspension into flight. The frozen arrow over the landscape comes back into view, and doubt shifts to the user: if the system continues to react to the tremors whilst the human gesture remains absent, where does the capacity to respond now lie? Amid the unpredictable disruptions, uncertainty and fear sweep over us, and we begin to hope that perhaps the user who left the cursor there has abandoned their chair and, with a sudden leap, bolted out the door towards the real High Sierra, in search of the real place. May that cursor, after all, be proof of a timely escape, just as the Cyclosa spider leaves a copy of itself in its web, causing the predator to believe it is still there whilst it escapes unscathed.

The very possibility of escape heightens the powerlessness of these digital creatures, forever condemned to the milieu that envelops them. And it is precisely there that they, once again, plunge us into fear. Before these sentinels, or the motionless arrow—that restless symbol of our endless clicks—we open our mouths and breathe as quietly as possible, just as Darwin’s son did when he was awakened in the night by a noise “under circumstances which naturally led to great care.”31 In the dimly lit space they occupy, the Réplicas then confront us with that fear in a different guise: the fear of our own permeability, of losing ourselves in the dissolving boundaries between figure and ground—what ground?—between the human organism and the non-human milieu—what milieu? Caillois would go on to say: “To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them.”32 It is the fear of depersonalisation through assimilation to and dissolution into the milieu, of the decline in the sense of personality and life, and it is also, now, the fear that paralysis might cease to be a momentary suspension and become a permanent condition—the fear of non-action. I am reminded of Roderick Usher, one of Edgar Allan Poe’s characters, when he exclaims in premonitory dread:

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Poe turns fear into an experience of anticipation, situated in the interval between the perception of a signal and the impossibility of stabilising what that signal announces, just as Estrela does in RedSkyFalls. Roderick, confined for many years to his old family home, allows himself to be overcome by the idea that the place possesses a kind of sentience, a milieu that seems to close in on itself, progressively reducing exteriority. When his twin sister Madeline, who suffers from an illness associated with transient states of cataleptic immobility, apparently dies, Roderick and the friend who visits him—whom Poe casts as narrator—place her body in a vault within the house. As the days pass, Roderick confesses to hearing his sister moving inside the tomb, convinced that they had entombed her alive. His friend, too, feels “an irrepressible tremor” gradually pervading his frame as he notices certain “indefinite sounds” coming “through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals.”34 It is thus through sound that fear takes on its most precise temporal form, as an experience of anticipation.

Hearing, in fact, runs through the entire story. Roderick suffers from an abnormal acuity of the senses, a general hypersensitivity which, as Laura Otis observes, Poe renders above all through sound, itself physiologically closely related to touch.35 One example is the stormy night when Roderick’s friend reads a story aloud to calm him. At this point in the narrative, Poe ensures that the sounds described in the story coincide with the noises that can be heard at the same time in the house itself. Hearing thus precedes visual confirmation. After her entombment, Madeline returns first as sonic unrest and only later reappears before their eyes. Otis’s essay Sound (2018), written about this short story, helps us to understand the role of sound in both “The Fall of the House of Usher” and RedSkyFalls. Otis begins with a physiological observation, noting that “sound and touch are closely related, since when the cells of the inner ear vibrate, the world touches its listener.”36 This formulation therefore allows us to think of sound as a form of physical contact between the outside world and the listener. In Poe, this sensory contact becomes a means of awareness of the event before what triggers it can be fully seen or understood. In Roderick’s hypersensitivity, the passage from vibration to sensation and from sensation to knowledge manifests itself in an extreme form. In RedSkyFalls, this relationship is technologically mediated: a distant seismic vibration is converted into sound—a tremor that a body in Venice could not feel directly reaches it in the form of an audible signal. The seismic event may remain distant, but the resulting noise touches the body—our body. The sound does not anticipate the movement of the ground (the event has already occurred or is being recorded) but, in the experience of the work, it recreates that same structure of anticipation: the rumble arrives before we know where the signal came from or what event triggered it. As in Poe’s tale, fear sets in as suspension in the gap between the body being affected and reason’s ability to stabilise the origin of what affects it.

In both “The Fall of the House of Usher” and RedSkyFalls, the problem is then shifted from the recognition of the signal to what may, or may not, follow it. In Roderick’s case, what he intuits through sound does not translate into action; in the Réplicas, the signal triggers a response, but that response cannot exceed the repertoire that determines it. Poe makes visible, through this character, the danger of a paralysis that recognition alone cannot undo, just as Estrela does through his Réplicas. In the end, a decisive destabilisation occurs. It is also at the very moment when the last two descendants of the Usher family converge in distinct states of suspension and collapse that Roderick’s friend overcomes his terror-induced immobility, running towards the outside and escaping the collapse he anticipates. Just as the red moon falls as Roderick’s friend flees the collapsing House of Usher, it is when the red sky falls, under the omen of the chimerical sentinels, that we place the possibility of breaking with immobility.37 Fear does not contain the answer within itself. And this is how RedSkyFalls returns us to the body. Perhaps the question is not so much whether we are capable of feeling the tremors of the world as whether we are still capable of acting in the midst of them.