Contemporânea

While seated in a wicker chair, probably idly passing the time in the corridor of his expansive family estate in Rincón Viejo, Adolfo Bioy Casares glimpsed the idea for his debut novel. As often happens, the inspiration came from an ordinary vision: that of his mother’s dressing room, endlessly multiplied in the depths of the three panels of her Venetian mirror. From this image, he developed the main premise of his book: the possibility of a machine capable of artificially reproducing humans with the same clarity as a mirror reflects an image.

This is how Bioy Casares described the birth of The Invention of Morel. In what became probably his most famous work, the Argentinian author narrates the story of a fugitive who arrives on what he believes to be a deserted island. After some time there, he encounters a group of people he assumes are tourists. Afraid of being seen, he observes them from a distance. Yet, as he studies their movements, he notices that they always return to the same places, repeat the same gestures and conversations, and seem completely unaware of his presence. In the end, we learn that they are not humans but highly realistic projections produced by a machine that uses tidal energy to replay the same fragments of life endlessly.

Although relatively brief, the novel is complex and lends itself to multiple interpretations. It is often seen as anticipating science fiction, while also feeling strikingly contemporary in its vision of a world where artificial reproductions are nearly indistinguishable from real things and beings. More broadly, the story has been read as a metaphor for literature (and even other forms of media) in its capacity to record, preserve, and restage life across time. What unites all these readings is certainly the book’s sharp enquiry into the relationship between reality and its reproduction. Indeed, the novel is structured by a pervasive logic of doubling, from its “mirrored” genealogy to the narrative itself, which continuously offers visual cues of repetition: two suns, two moons, and the hard-to-forget image of an aquarium of living fish alongside another where they float, dead and putrefied.

I’ll stop here so as not to spoil the pleasure of reading it first-hand, but this brief overview helps frame the different connections linking Alexandre Estrela’s practice to this story. The novel was introduced to Estrela by Ricardo Nicolau—co-curator of the current pavilion together with Ana Baliza—who, in a recent interview, recalls sharing it with the artist years ago, establishing an early point of contact.1 By 2013, in the exhibition Meio Concreto, curated by Nicolau at the Museu de Serralves, traces of Bioy Casares’s ideas were already evident. In his text for the exhibition catalogue, Nicolau notes how Estrela’s works, like the holograms produced by Morel’s machine, “make us suspect our eyes,” as they occupy a liminal space between the physical and the purely intangible, their digital immateriality countered by the visible apparatus that sustains them (projectors, cables, screens) and by the constant involvement of the viewer’s physical body.2

If this connection runs throughout Estrela’s practice, RedSkyFalls, his installation for the Portuguese Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale, is perhaps the work that most closely echoes Bioy Casares’s novel. Here, the artist seems to take on a role akin to Dr Morel, creating a system that similarly reproduces aspects of reality—most notably the movement of certain animals, translated into animated drawings—while also responding in real time to natural forces. Like Bioy Casares’s machine, RedSkyFalls is driven by environmental phenomena, though here not by the gentle pull of tides but by the violence of seismic shifts. Much like The Invention of Morel, Estrela’s pavilion also opens itself to multiple readings, as it continuously generates references, analogies, and doubles that shift and expand the more one engages with the work, thus rendering any attempt at classification partial and unstable. I should also take a moment to admit that I haven’t seen the work in person; I’ve only encountered it through reproductions—images, secondary accounts, and other doubles. Therefore, this text does not seek to review the work or resolve any of these interpretations but rather to follow, and perhaps get lost within, some of its endless reverberations, which unfold and multiply like the reflections in Casares’s maternal mirror.

The first of these doubles that I would like to address is perhaps the most evident: the duplication of the artist’s own computer with the iconic macOS High Sierra default desktop. According to the artist, it was not initially planned but occurred by accident. The green underwater environment—now confined to the smaller video within the installation—was meant to occupy the main projection. However, in the process of testing, something unexpected yet quite common happened: the computer’s desktop appeared, filling the wall with its quiet, undesired landscape. What might have remained a technical glitch was instead taken up as an integral part of the piece, introducing a set of nuances and productive tensions.

When I first encountered what could be considered a 1.0 version of this work at Estrela’s solo exhibition A Natureza Aborrece o Monstro at Culturgest Lisbon in 2024, recognising the desktop image triggered in me an almost uncontrollable laugh, as I read it primarily as an ironic, certainly sharp gesture. Encountering such an image in a show often signals that something is not quite right, as it usually appears when a projection crashes and the illusion is suddenly broken. In an instant, the trick is undone, and the viewer is no longer positioned before a representation meant to transport them elsewhere, but before the conditions that make that abstraction possible in the first place: the interface, with its files and folders, floating over a pristine mountain landscape. However, here, that is clearly not the case.

Thinking about it a posteriori, I moved beyond that initial sense of amusement and reflected on how this choice to employ the computer’s desktop is entirely consistent with Estrela’s broader practice. As mentioned earlier, in his exhibitions, materials such as cables, projectors, and technical supports are never concealed but treated as an integral, even sculptural, component of the works. Here, the screensaver seems to extend this logic from hardware to software: it is not simply an image but the background of the “machine” within which visual materials are seen and modified by the artist. Even the cursor, the digital tool par excellence, is present, becoming part of the visual field and breaking the illusion even for those who do not recognise that photograph.

What I appreciate about Estrela’s appropriation of such a common image is that its apparent lack of originality is precisely what makes the choice radical and, paradoxically, very original. The macOS High Sierra screensaver from 2017 is at once iconic and utterly generic: an image that somehow detached from authorship, belonging equally to everyone and no one. It is the backdrop of Estrela’s digital life as it is of mine: when I answer emails, read the news, watch films, or scroll through questionable social media content, those red mountains are always there, behind everything I do.

And yet, I often find myself questioning whether that landscape is even real. Its extreme standardisation and deep integration into everyday technological routines make it difficult to perceive it as a photograph at all. For that very reason, I am inclined to think of it as a “non-image.” If Marc Augé’s notion of the “non-place” defines spaces of circulation and transit (airports, motorways, supermarkets) where identity, history, and relational depth are suspended in favour of standardised functionality, then the screensaver shares similar characteristics at the level of vision: it is a transitory landscape, one we see often but never really inhabit—a background designed not to be engaged with but simply to be contemplated as we do something else.3

Yet, despite the prefix that somehow negates them, Augé’s non-places do exist. What, then, is the status of this non-image? As I researched, I found confirmation that it is an actual photograph of a mountain landscape in California’s Sierra Nevada. In 2013, Apple shifted from naming its operating systems after big cats to naming them after Californian locations, each paired with a photograph of the corresponding landscape as a screensaver. These desktops follow a consistent visual logic: beyond being high-resolution vistas designed to showcase the capabilities of new 5K displays, they depict expansive, elevated viewpoints with no buildings and no human presence—only nature.

This idea of placing the viewer in front of a representation of a vast natural view reminded me, at least superficially, of Romantic landscape painting. Such depictions of towering mountains, turbulent oceans, or infinite skies were crafted to confront humans with the overwhelming scale and power of nature, producing a feeling of awe and unease known as the sublime. While Apple’s desktop images seem to borrow this visual language with their expansive horizons, dramatic light, and elemental contrasts, they offer a domesticated version stripped of its destabilising force. The landscape may appear vast and stunning, but it is contained within a 15” screen and reduced to a background. There is no human within the image because the user occupies that position: you are cast as the brave protagonist of that famous Friedrich painting,4 standing at the edge and gazing at a smooth, frictionless image, devoid of labour, history, or contingency: a neutralised sublime.5

However, in RedSkyFalls, the mountain vista, now projected at large scale, seems to recover a more impactful, perhaps unsettling presence. The image is luminous and imposing; the landscape regains weight and force. The viewer is no longer positioned above it, in quiet control, but before it. Yet, for me, what truly reactivates a certain logic of the sublime is not scale but the work’s relation to one of the earth’s most unpredictable forces—one that no Romantic painter ever dared to represent: earthquakes.

Earlier works by Alexandre Estrela often operated as self-contained systems in which algorithms generated movement, modulated sound, or codified collective behaviour, giving the pieces an internal, quasi-autonomous life.6 In RedSkyFalls, however, this logic shifts: the system is no longer closed but porous, responsive not to digital input but to natural forces beyond itself. Echoing Dr Morel’s machine, where projections are powered by tides, Estrela’s system is instead influenced by seismic activity. The installation draws on real-time data from a European seismic agency: whenever an earthquake above magnitude 4.5 occurs anywhere on the planet, the entire environment of the piece transforms.

The Mac desktop image flips abruptly from a winter to a summer landscape in what the artist calls “seasonal accelerationism,”7 while a primordial sound erupts—so powerful that it breaks the paper protecting the amplifier onto which the subaquatic video is projected. During a visit to the artist’s studio in Lisbon, Estrela and Ana Baliza shared an anecdote about this sound. A musician and artist friend of theirs, said to have perfect pitch, identified it as a tritone.8 In medieval times, this interval was associated with the diabolic and was even famously prohibited by the Church for its unsettling dissonant. My ear is not precise enough to verify this, but the idea that a scale historically linked to musical instability might signal an event defined by rupture feels apt: an unsteady sound for an unstable, diabolical ground. As the noise of the earthquake fills the space, the animated drawings projected onto the metallic plates suspended before the Californian mountain respond to the threat with what seems to be a primal reaction. Faced with catastrophe, animals and humans typically respond in three ways: fight, flight, or freeze. Here, it is clearly the latter: the animations remain immobile in the face of this overwhelming, almost sublime force.

In 1931, Walter Benjamin hosted a radio programme for children on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.9 With a certain directness, and without adjusting his vocabulary for a young audience, he recounts the disaster that destroyed the capital of the Portuguese Empire at the height of its power. Drawing on contemporary testimonies—likely from those who reacted in “flight mode” and managed to escape—he reconstructs the event: from the shockwaves that struck the city to the massive tsunami that first emptied the Tagus River before crashing back over it, alongside other anecdotes of the tragedy that now, almost a century after Benjamin’s broadcast, are retold so frequently that they can still be heard on a tuk-tuk ride through the hills of Lisbon. Yet, Benjamin also shares something less familiar, even to the city’s own inhabitants: a series of strange phenomena said to have preceded, or perhaps announced, the earthquake. Along with reports of hurricanes, cloudbursts, and floods across Europe, one occurrence in particular stands out. Poised ambiguously between an omen and a biblical plague, witnesses in distant Cádiz described an unusual sight: a sudden proliferation of worms emerging from the ground. Eight days later, on 1 November 1755, the city of Cádiz was partially destroyed by tremors originating in the Portuguese capital.

This episode may be dismissed as a coincidence, or read otherwise. However, in fact, there is a material basis for the behaviour of these creatures. Worms do not predict earthquakes as such—their nervous systems are unlikely to process events at that scale—but they are highly sensitive to minute vibrations and subtle shifts in the soil. For them, subterranean movement signals danger, often associated with predators, prompting them to rise to the surface despite the risk of exposure. Seismic activity can also release gases such as carbon dioxide, further encouraging this ascent. For these reasons, worms can function as unconscious biosentinels, capable of registering environmental changes that precede earthquakes in ways that humans, and their seemingly advanced technologies, cannot.

It is precisely this line of thought that Alexandre Estrela reactivates in RedSkyFalls, drawing on a now-abandoned field of seismic research that once considered animal behaviour as a means of anticipating earthquakes. Yet, the beings that Estrela creates to inhabit the desktop image—what he calls “REPLICAS”—do not, at first glance, resemble any recognisable animal. Here, the artist does not pursue the full sensory realism of Morel’s machine, nor even the mono-sensory fidelity of the mirror, but instead proposes a distorted, less obvious reflection.

“What is this that stands before me?” is Ozzy Osbourne’s opening line in the song “Black Sabbath,” sung over an eerie tritone guitar motif.10 The reference feels apt here, not only for its lyrical question but for the way the “devilish” music itself also carries a comparable ambiguity to that generated by the REPLICAS—a strangeness that resists clear naming, suspended between recognition and uncertainty. I saw one of the engraved drawings on the metallic plates in Estrela’s studio; it was a simple, two dimensional drawing with little resemblance to any animal. According to the artist, the engraving originates in rapid drawings that he describes as desenhos médios. Initially conceived as sketches for potential animations, these incomplete forms remained open, awaiting activation. This activation—or, more precisely, this animation—occurs when the plates receive the projection that brings the drawings to life. The effect creates the illusion that the projection itself produces the engraving, as though light had carved the surface—a form of photography in the most literal sense. What animates these drawings, and what gives them their eerie sense of realism, is that their movement is based on data drawn from neuroscience laboratories, modulating the forms through the motion of specific, sometimes recognisable animal parts.

These are the hybrid digital creatures that inhabit Estrela’s appropriated Sierra Nevada landscape: composite beings animated through borrowed rhythms, gestures, and behavioural traces. Unlike chimeras, or even Frankenstein’s creature, the artist’s REPLICAS differ in a crucial respect: they are assembled not from bodies but from movements. This distinction becomes clearer if we return to the etymology of the word “animal,” from the Latin anima, meaning breath, soul, or vital force. The term does not originally designate a fixed biological category but rather a principle of animation, the capacity of objects and forms to move and imitate life. So the REPLICAS are not animals in a representational sense but in an etymological one: animated entities brought into being through motion. Their “aliveness” depends not on appearance but on movement, as well as on their instinctual responsiveness to seismic activity.

From the encounter with these beings, a strange effect may emerge: if, from these “lifeless” plates, certain movements become recognisable, they may produce a strange form of empathy—directed not towards a living subject but towards something “inert” that oscillates between the known and the unknown. As we recognise certain animal features in Estrela’s creatures, we are invited to reconsider empathy beyond its now-fashionable use in contemporary art discourse, returning instead to its historical roots. The term derives from the German Einfühlung, literally “feeling into,” and emerged in late nineteenth-century aesthetic theory to describe an affective engagement not to other people’s emotions but with forms and objects. In this earlier sense, empathy referred not to understanding another person’s emotions but to a process of animation: the attribution of movement, tension, or affect to inanimate entities. In a text included in the press kit, Estrela recalls a conversation with José Manuel Barata Xavier in which the latter remarks, in relation to animation, “o que o olho não vê, o cérebro constrói” (what the eye does not see, the brain constructs).

It could be argued that Estrela’s practice has long engaged with this principle, inhabiting the interval between seeing and making sense. Yet, as suggested earlier, this space between perception and construction is also where an expanded notion of empathy seems to operate—and where RedSkyFalls situates itself. However, while this work occupies the same interstice Estrela has long explored, it now seems less concerned with reflecting on reality and representation than with activating that space to probe what can be seen—and known—through empathy. Like the image of the Venetian mirror at the beginning of this text, with its multiple, deceptively realistic reflections, RedSkyFalls operates as a system of mirrors that never settles into stable recognition, instead exposing persistent gaps in perception and knowledge. It is within these gaps that the installation proposes empathy as a means of approaching what cannot be fully understood; and it does so not only by inviting identification with animal-like movements in animated drawings, nor by simply synchronising us with distant, potentially catastrophic geophysical events, but by prompting reflection on the limits of our own perceptual frameworks. And in doing so, it encourages attention not only to the specific movements of other beings and their complexity, but also to the world that animates them.

These concerns recall Benjamin’s concluding remarks in his radio broadcast, where he observed that, even 176 years after Lisbon’s catastrophe, humanity remained largely unprepared for such events and unwilling to attend to sensibilities that exceed us and fall outside what we conventionally recognise as “knowledge.” Today, nearly three centuries after the earthquake, both observations still hold. Even though we have reached distant regions of outer space, mapped the human genome, discovered nuclear energy, and created digital environments that closely resemble reality, earthquakes remain largely unpredictable. This slower progress in seismology reflects not only a technical limitation but also a perceptual constraint—one that could be attributed to a lack of empathy. In our pride, we remain unwilling to empathise with other beings, as we struggle to accept that tiny creatures such as worms might still teach us something about how to confront the destructive and sublime forces of nature.

RedSkyFalls

DGARTES