September 19, 2021
BoCA - Biennial of Contemporary Arts
Ria Formosa, Faro, Portugal

Curated by Delfim Sardo and Sílvia Gomes

Boat trip with sound installation

Solar Boat is a sound work constructed from individually recorded encounters with strangers: a bilingual child, a conservation biologist, a motorcyclist, a transformist, a premature baby.

Fragments of speech, environmental sounds and manipulated recordings drift between documentary intimacy and hallucination, producing a landscape that is simultaneously physical and psychological.

Originally presented aboard a solar-powered boat travelling between Faro and Ilha Deserta, the work unfolds as a suspended crossing — part conversation, part emotional transmission, part disorientation.

Rather than organising voices into narrative coherence, Solar Boat allows speech to circulate through tonal repetition, distortion and interruption. Memories, fantasies, fears and bodily sensations emerge without stable hierarchy.

Themes of rescue, death, speed, animality and vulnerability appear throughout the piece, not as fixed subjects but as unstable emotional states.

The work approaches sound as a space of psychic contagion: something capable of dissolving distinctions between inner and outer worlds, human and non-human presence, intimacy and distance.

A hymn for the crossing.