O sopro fóssil
[The fossil breath]

2022

     O sopro fóssil [The fossil breath] arises from the exhibition A brisa do maremoto [The seaquake breeze], a video and sound installation presented in October 2021, at Appleton [Box], in Lisbon, which focused on lioz stone (fossil limestone of marine sedimentary origin) to establish a relationship with the local landscape. There, the fossils trapped in the stone, visible throughout the city, appeared in different states of conservation, degradation, fracture and erosion. If, on the one hand, the history of lioz formation leads us to a threat of warming and rising sea waters, on the other their fossilization dates back to the last great mass extinction.
     In this change of place, away from that landscape, but following the same conscience, the installation is transformed, its shape is disturbed, and the fossils disintegrate. Here, we no longer have stone, time contained, but aridity, dry sand that goes back to a distant sea, the sand of counting time and the sand that erases footprints, erases traces, the sand of oblivion.
     An echo propagates through space and, in the place of fossils, the spoken and drawn word appears, in a speculative dynamic. From the stone formed in the sea or the sand torn apart by it, we witness a time that surpasses us: the geological time, of sedimentation and the time of erosion, elusive, inevitable.