Nomad Lines, 2021.
Performance and sound-piece in Teatro do Ferro, Porto, Portugal.

Commissioned by FIMP.
Nomad Lines was presented as a WIP (work-in-process) during the festival FIMP 2021.

Nomad Lines presents a living body that is looking for its origins. He is surrounded by other nomads who encourage, frighten and question him. It is a moving body and, through its physicality, aims to unravel the mystery of the present and invisible connections that link us to others and to the Earth and its deepest forces of existance. It invites us to look at our creation as a sung line that moves and shifts, sometimes twisted, sometimes broken. Paths in transformation. An essay that brings together two artists to investigate, in a visual way, how these paths are traversed. What features occupy them? What gestures are animated in them?

For the residency and performance I invited the performer is Maria Miguel, an artist and researcher of the movement. From the perspective of embodied knowledge, Miguel plays in a volatile, improvised and regenerative practice, mainly through dance, video art and live performance, where there is a space to play around the transfusion of art and technology.

Throughout the artistic process we also invited Francisco Babo and Gaspar Cohen, who were responsible for the composition of the sound core, that was played live. It included various sound experiments, voices and a berimbau.

The Photos were taken by Pedro Sardinha/ Fimp.

The research had two principle references in literature: Bruce Chatwin and Iris Murdoch.
In the beginning the Earth was an infinite and murky plain, seperated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight. There were neither Sun nor Moon nor Stars. Yet, far away …

The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe.
The past was folded up and in a twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.