sempre viva cobra d’água, by Jota Mombaça

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‘sempre viva cobra d’água’ is an environmental installation performance that opens up to the forces of time and offers poetic coordinates for reimagining the ways in which time, element and body sustain the possibility of living through lack of definition and metamorphosis.

Interdisciplinary in nature, this work moves through the realms of sculpture, public art and durational performance.

Continuing her engagement with issues relating to water and the radical performance of “sinking”, Jota Mombaça presents a project that incorporates a ritual process involving voice, sound and physical performance. It is a moment of connection between material life, perishable or mutable, and the forces that govern and transform it.

With its starting point in the CAM Foyer, the audience will be invited to follow a journey taken by Jota Mombaça and performer Luan Okum, who carry a seven-metre horizontal ceramic piece to the source of the Garden’s creek, a stream of water that flows to the lake winding through the vegetation, where the piece will be sunk. This walk will be punctuated by murmurs chanted by the artist and by the performer, which echo through the garden, creating a moment that is both stripped back and ceremonial.   

In dialogue with Leonor Antunes exhibition, the ceramic piece, made up of small cylindrical blocks and discs joined by a sisal rope, will remain sunken for its duration. The work is then transformed by time and the forces of nature.


Biographies


Credits

Main image

'sinking could be', 2022. Sinking sculptures on the Singelgracht canal, Amsterdam. Photo: Pedro Yared Lima. 

Composition and sound landscape

Jota Mombaça 

Co-performer

Luan Okun

Executive production

Pedro Yared Lima 

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation reserves the right to collect and keep records of images, sounds and voice for the diffusion and preservation of the memory of its cultural and artistic activity. For further information, please contact us through the Information Request form.

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