‘The Performing Garden’ is a site-specific performance that integrates opera, art, and environmental listening into a poetic gesture of cohabitation.

Unfolding around the South Garden pond, where the installation is located, this piece traces the imagined voice of a mallard duck who chooses not to migrate. Instead, it opts to remain, to sing, to inhabit the pause of movement and to embrace hedonism.

Through voice, sound, and material presence, the work explores the friction between instinct and defiance, between movement and stillness. Soprano, composer, and the sculptural presence emerge and recede within the landscape, weaving human and more-than-human rhythms into a shared moment of resonance.

The soundscape evolves in real time, responding to the atmosphere and presence of the garden. It invites the audience into a simultaneously contemplative and sensory engagement with the installation, while reinforcing the project’s central themes of ecological interconnection and more-than-human cocreation.

Here, the garden itself and its inhabitants become uninvited collaborators, contributing to the performance in their own unique ways, opening up new modes of listening and coexisting.

This performance follows the talk ‘Voicing the More-Than-Human: an Interdisciplinary Research’, with Rosana Antolí, composer Jorge Ramos and scientists Rui Oliveira and Gonzalo de Polavieja.