Attuning to Absence emerges from sustained, place-based engagement with the Rio Lima and its surrounding ecologies. This engagement is created and developed through sustained presence: repeated walks and field visits across different seasons and tides, conversations with local communities, and attentive observation of the river’s changing conditions.
Multisensory literacy, deep perceptual attunement, and ethical engagement with both human and more-than-human worlds are essential to address and contextualise the crisis of biodiversity loss that unfolds in the present moment. Our artistic intent is to reframe this disappearance as an active zone of relational perception and ecological meaning where silence and absence function as a resonant site for poetic fabulation and shared vulnerability.
The river is both a collection of absences and a playground for creation, a vehicle where the attention given to the unseen and unheard (therefore: absent) is to be extrapolated in order to provide a framework for the tangibility of processes of extinction, erosion, and ecological interdependence. The micro- informs and contextualises the macro- and the hyper-.
The pairing of technology with speculative fabulation and intermedia translation allows for the cultivation of a perceptual ecology that foregrounds noticing differently, namely in attending to its thresholds and in amplifying the subtle presences that underlie processes of change.
Attuning to Absence situates human experience alongside the agency of non-human communities, emphasising relationality, multispecies entanglements, and the ethical dimensions of attention. Through this project, we aim to create tools and experiences that expand ecological literacy, foster care for water habitats, and cultivate attentive, sensory engagement with disappearance as both phenomenon and methodology.
We aim to evoke past abundance and to delve into potential futures, inviting participants to sense what was, what is being lost, and what might be.

Credits

Tatiana Rosa and Pedro Matias
Concept & Artistic Direction

Stefanie Rosa - Scientific Consultancy
Adrien Sicard - Scientific Consultancy
Sara Ottati - eDNA Processing
Adriana Romero - Documentary / Videography
André Lourenço - Text Editing & Revision
Rita Fialho - Web Design & Font Design
Danian Marengo - Web Developer
Isabel Sousa - Explore Iberia -Territory Expert
Aviva Obst - Arts Communications, Press & Public Relations