2.1 Performativity, Embodiment, and the Ecology of Presence

Performance studies have long recognised the body as a locus of knowledge and transformation. For Fischer-Lichte (2008), performance generates meaning through the autopoietic feedback loop between performer and spectator, where perception and affect co-create the event. Within this dynamic, the body is not a vehicle of representation but a medium of transformation. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phenomenology situates perception as a corporeal dialogue between self and world, in which the body is both perceiving and perceived.

In e depois longo tempo {quietude}, these principles inform the treatment of the performer’s body as a listening instrument, a site of reciprocal exchange with the environment. The performance does not seek to portray the landscape but to enter resonance with it. Gestures, pauses, and breaths are modulated by environmental rhythms, echoing Kershaw’s (2007) concept of eco-performance, where the performer’s presence participates in the ecology of the event rather than imposing itself upon it (Dinis 2023).

This approach reconfigures the traditional performer–audience dichotomy. Rather than presenting a narrative or spectacle, the work invites a shared experience of duration and attentiveness. The audience, too, becomes implicated in the ecology of perception, as their sensory engagement completes the performative circuit. This resonates with Berleant’s (1992) notion of aesthetic engagement, which rejects the detached observer in favour of immersive participation. In the quiet space of quietude, perception itself becomes performative, i.e., an act of co-presence rather than observation (Dinis 2023).

The performance also challenges anthropocentric understandings of embodiment. By positioning the body within an interdependent network of material forces – wind, sound, image, and geological texture – the project affirms what Alaimo (2010) calls trans-corporeality: the recognition that human and non-human bodies are porous and entangled. This theoretical stance underpins the project’s ethical dimension. To inhabit quietude is to acknowledge this entanglement, to allow the boundaries between performer and environment to blur. In doing so, the work enacts an ecology of presence, where stillness and attention function as modes of environmental care.

2.2 Digital Mediation and the Expanded Sensorium

While quietude privileges slowness and stillness, it also depends upon digital mediation as a means of extending perception. Within the broader field of digital performance, scholars such as Dixon (2007) and Salter (2010) have argued that technology transforms both the aesthetics and ontology of performance, creating hybrid spaces where physical and digital realities converge. Yet the project resists the notion of technology as an instrument of spectacle or disembodiment. Instead, digital tools are treated as prosthetic extensions of perception, amplifying the subtle rhythms of the environment.

Microphones capture inaudible vibrations, and cameras record imperceptible shifts in light. These phenomena are then translated by projection surfaces into shared sensory experiences. This process aligns with Parikka’s (2015) concept of media geology and materiality, in which technologies are viewed as geological and ecological extensions of the world they depict. Media devices, composed of mineral and energetic materials, are products of geological processes and continuations of the natural world, not contradictions. In this sense, the digital is not separate from the natural, but part of the same ecological continuum: a technological ecology embedded within planetary materiality.

In this project, therefore, microphones, sensors and projectors were conceptualised not as instruments of representation, but as co-performers and extensions of the landscape’s sensory capacities. Through their use, the performance established a field of perceptual reciprocity in which sound, image and environment interacted as equal agents. This created an audiovisual field that invited both performers and audience members to experience a sense of stillness and attunement. Distinctions between nature, technology, and perception were dissolved, and the digital became a medium through which the Earth perceives itself, rendering it a site of ecological interconnection.

The project also engages with the concept of slow media (Fuller 2018), which advocates temporal deceleration as an aesthetic response to the overstimulation of contemporary media culture. The deliberate pacing of quietude, its long visual takes, sustained sonic textures, and extended silences, encourages a more reflective engagement with technological mediation. The performance thereby transforms digital media from a vehicle of immediacy into a medium of contemplation. It reclaims the technological sensorium as a space for perception rather than consumption.

This integration of digital and embodied modes of experience exemplifies what Hansen (2006) calls the ‘digital affect’, i.e., the capacity of technology to evoke pre-reflective sensations that anchor the viewer in the here and now. In quietude, the digital is not used to abstract or simulate nature, but to intensify presence, rendering perceptible the subtle vibrations of the environment. The interplay between analogue perception and digital mediation thus creates a hybrid sensorium, one that extends beyond the body while remaining grounded in material experience.

2.3 Heritages and Cultural Ecosystem Services

The concept of natural-cultural heritage, first articulated in the Declaration of Belém (1988) and later developed by Posey (1999) and Maffi (2001), provides a critical lens for understanding this interdependence. It asserts that cultural diversity and biological diversity are mutually sustaining, each providing the context for the other’s survival.

Within this framework, quietude explores how artistic practice can translate natural and cultural values into experiential form. The performance maps emotional and sensory characteristics of the geopark, such as calm, introspection, and equanimity, onto its physical spaces, establishing an affective cartography that connects personal perception with collective heritage. This process reimagines the landscape not as static scenery but as a living archive of geological, ecological, and cultural memory. The performer’s engagement with place becomes a mode of re-inscription, renewing the relationship between body and environment through creative encounter.

This perspective resonates with the CES model (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005), which recognises the aesthetic, spiritual, and cognitive benefits derived from ecosystems. Yet, as Chan et al. (2012) argue, CES have often been underexplored in qualitative and experiential terms. Artistic research provides a crucial complement to this framework by articulating the felt dimensions of ecosystem interaction. Through performance and digital mediation, quietude exemplifies how art can render these intangible services tangible, transforming emotional and perceptual experiences into cultural knowledge.

By evoking quietude as a shared affective condition, the work generates non-material benefits aligned with CES principles: aesthetic appreciation, emotional well-being, and a renewed sense of belonging to place. These outcomes, though ephemeral, are significant indicators of what Soini and Birkeland (2014) describe as cultural sustainability, i.e., the capacity of communities to maintain meaningful relationships with their environments through cultural expression and memory. The performance thus acts as both a representation and enactment of sustainability, where ecological ethics are embodied through aesthetic practice.

2.4 Synthesis: Towards an Ecological Aesthetics of Stillness

The theoretical framework underpinning e depois longo tempo {quietude} can therefore be summarised as an ecological aesthetics of stillness, a mode of artistic inquiry that integrates embodiment, mediation, and environmental awareness. The project draws from performance theory’s focus on the body as a generator of knowledge, from digital studies’ understanding of technology as material ecology, and from environmental humanities’ articulation of culture as a sustaining force within ecosystems.

This synthesis challenges dichotomies that separate art and science, technology and nature, human and environment. Instead, it proposes an interdependent ontology where artistic creation becomes an ecological process in itself. Quietude, as both an aesthetic and ethical principle, mediates these relationships through attentiveness, patience, and care. It invites a reconsideration of how art might participate in the broader project of sustainability, not by representing environmental issues but by enacting modes of being that are themselves sustainable.

3.1 Artistic Research as Situated Inquiry

The methodological framework of e depois longo tempo {quietude} is grounded in art-based research and practice-as-research, where artistic creation constitutes both the process and the outcome of inquiry (Barone and Eisner 2012; Borgdorff 2012). Rather than positioning artistic practice as illustrative or supplementary, this approach understands practice itself as a mode of situated knowledge production, capable of articulating experiential, affective, and non-discursive forms of understanding.

The research is further informed by phenomenological approaches to perception, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) conception of embodied experience as a reciprocal relation between body and world. Within this framework, perception is not a passive reception of stimuli but an active, relational process. The performer’s body is thus understood as a perceptual interface through which spatial, temporal, and environmental relations are negotiated.

This methodological orientation allows the research to address ecological and cultural questions through embodied engagement, privileging attentiveness, duration, and sensory immersion over representational analysis. Quietude functions here as a methodological disposition, guiding how the research is conducted rather than prescribing its outcomes.

3.2 Site Immersion and Phenomenological Observation

The research process was developed through sustained artistic immersion within selected symbolic places of the Viana do Castelo Littoral Aspiring UNESCO Global Geopark (VCLAG). The VCLAG, located in the north-west of Portugal, extends over approximately 4,800 hectares of protected natural and cultural landscapes encompassing coastal cliffs, river estuaries and mountainous terrain. Its geological strata document more than 570 million years of Earth’s evolution, offering a tangible record of the planet’s deep time and an exceptional setting for the present exploration.

The territory comprises rocks of various ages, ranging from the Palaeozoic to the Cenozoic, and of different genetic origins (magmatic, metamorphic and sedimentary). This results in complex topography and pronounced lithological and geochemical heterogeneity, including granites, quartzites, shales, conglomerates and arenites, which sustain distinct ecosystems.

Traces of human occupation, dating back to the Palaeolithic era, reveal long-term interaction between people and landscape, from early bifacial stone tool workshops to hilltop settlements and, later, riverbank settlements such as the first four agro-fishing villages (Átrio, Castro, Figueiredo and Vinha), predating the formation of the Portuguese nation.

Today, these ecosystems and cultural relics are protected within three Special Areas of Conservation (Litoral Norte – PTCON0020, Rio Lima – PTCON0017 and Serra de Arga – PTCON0039) of the Natura 2000 Network. They are also home to thirteen geosites that have been classified as Local Natural Monuments (Aviso 4658/2016, de 6 de Abril and Aviso 1212/2018, de 25 de Janeiro), as well as over one hundred archaeological and memory sites (VCLAG, 2025). This integration of local communities, scientific research and sustainable tourism is all part of a shared environmental framework.

For this project, the geopark functioned not only as a setting but as a co-creator, an active participant in the research process. Fieldwork was conducted at the three main environments, reflecting the region’s diverse ecosystems: the coastal promontories of Montedor, the estuarial wetlands of the Lima River, and the granite formations of Arga Mountain (Figure 1). Each site presented distinct acoustic, visual, and atmospheric qualities that informed the performative and audiovisual composition of the work.

Figure 1

Documentation of the fieldwork. Arga Mountain. (Frederico Dinis, 2024).

Phenomenological observation constituted a central methodological practice. Periods of stillness, listening, and attentional dwelling were used to attune the performer to subtle environmental rhythms, including wind movement, tidal cycles, sonic textures, and variations of light. These experiences were recorded through written notes, sketches, and sound diaries, functioning as reflective traces rather than empirical data.

This phase aligns with what van Manen (1990) describes as an engagement with lived experience, where meaning emerges through careful attention to perception rather than abstraction. The observations informed both the conceptual structure and the affective orientation of the performance, establishing correspondences between environmental qualities and the thematic focus on quietude.

3.3 Audiovisual Practice and Digital Mediation

Audiovisual practice formed an integral part of the research methodology. Environmental sound recordings and visual materials were collected on site, capturing the acoustic ecology and visual textures of the geopark. These materials were not treated as documentary evidence but as sensory extensions of the embodied experience of place.

Digital tools were used to edit, layer, and transform these materials, following an aesthetic of minimal intervention. In line with Dixon (2007) and Salter (2010), digital mediation is understood here as an extension of corporeal perception rather than a disembodied layer. Sound and image function as temporal and affective modulations, amplifying subtle environmental dynamics while preserving their material presence (Dinis 2023).

In live performance contexts, the performer operates simultaneously as narrator and media operator, manipulating audiovisual material in real time. This performative configuration establishes a feedback loop between body, technology, and environment, allowing the performance to remain responsive and situational. The digital apparatus thus participates in the ecology of the performance rather than acting as a neutral tool.

3.4 Method, Process, and Artistic Outcome

For clarity, it is important to distinguish between method, process, and artistic outcome within this research. The method consists of an art-based and phenomenological research framework that integrates embodied observation, site immersion, and digital mediation. The process refers to the iterative cycles of fieldwork, audiovisual composition, rehearsal, live performance, and reflection through which the work evolved. The artistic outcome is the site-responsive audiovisual performance e depois longo tempo {quietude}, together with its associated audiovisual artefacts and documentation.

These elements are not sequential but interdependent. Insights generated through performance informed subsequent compositional decisions, while reflection on audiovisual material reshaped embodied practice. This recursive structure corresponds to Borgdorff’s (2012) notion of research in and through artistic practice, where knowledge emerges through continuous movement between making and thinking.

3.5 Audience Experience and Qualitative Reflection

At the performative moment, the audience encountered e depois longo tempo {quietude} not as a conventional spectacle, but as a shared temporal and perceptual situation unfolding in situ. Positioned in close proximity to the performer and the audiovisual setup, spectators were immersed in an environment shaped by restrained bodily gestures, extended durations of stillness, and gradual transformations of sound and image derived from the landscape. Rather than being addressed directly or instructed on how to respond, the audience entered a condition of attentive presence sustained by silence, slowness, and minimal action.

Visual projection, ambient texture processing, and the performer’s real-time interventions operated at low intensity, orienting perception towards subtle variations in texture, and spatial resonance. Within this setting, audience members experienced the work through their own bodily orientation – listening, waiting, sensing temporal suspension – becoming aware of posture, breathing, and their relation to the place. The experience unfolded as a condition of shared stillness in which perception was collectively modulated, laying the ground for a relational and co-constitutive mode of reception.

Audience experience constitutes an integral dimension of the research, not as an object of measurement but as a relational and reflective extension of the performative ecology activated by e depois longo tempo {quietude}. In line with Fischer-Lichte’s (2008) understanding of performance as an event generated through autopoietic feedback loops, audience members are not positioned as external observers but as participants situated within the same perceptual field as the performer. Reception thus emerges as a co-constitutive process shaped by shared attentiveness, stillness, and temporal openness.

Audience responses were gathered through informal post-performance conversations, written reflections, and observational notes. These materials are not treated as evaluative or representative data, but as qualitative traces of affective resonance and perceptual engagement. This methodological stance aligns with phenomenological approaches that privilege lived experience, i.e., erlebnis (Husserl 2004) and reflective insight over abstraction or quantification (Merleau-Ponty 1962; van Manen 1990). Rather than categorising responses, the research attends to how participants articulate shifts in perception, emotion, and temporal awareness.

From this perspective, audience experience operates as a site of reflective mediation between the performative event and the broader research enquiry. Reflections frequently point to altered perceptions of time, heightened sensory awareness, and an intensified sense of connection to place. These responses support the proposition that quietude functions as a performative condition capable of recalibrating perceptual habits, allowing environments to be sensed and inhabited differently.

Within the framework of artistic research, audience engagement contributes to knowledge production not through validation or consensus, but through resonance and relationality. As Borgdorff (2012) argues, knowledge produced in and through artistic practice remains situated, embodied, and open-ended. In this sense, the audience becomes part of the performative ecology of quietude, participating in the generation of affective and experiential knowledge while preserving the poetic and indeterminate nature of the work.

Rather than claiming measurable behavioural change or long-term environmental impact, this research foregrounds the role of artistic practice in cultivating perceptual, affective, and ethical conditions that may support ecological awareness over time.

4.1 Overview

The artistic research project e depois longo tempo {quietude} constitutes both the process and the outcome of this study. Conceived and developed within the VCLAG, the work investigates how audiovisual performativity can mediate the relationship between body, technology, and landscape through an aesthetic of stillness. The findings discussed here arise from practice-based inquiry, where reflection and creation evolved simultaneously through iterative cycles of fieldwork, composition, and live performance.

Rather than presenting ‘results’ in a conventional empirical sense, this section articulates the emergent understandings that arose from the creative process: how quietude operates as a performative and ecological mode of perception; how digital media reconfigure the sensory field; and how the work reveals the affective, cultural, and ethical dimensions of the natural and cultural heritage.

4.2 Quietude as Embodied and Ecological Performativity

The central finding of the research lies in the articulation of quietude as performative practice, an embodied method of ecological attunement that transforms stillness into a mode of engagement. Throughout the process, quietude was experienced not as a static or contemplative withdrawal but as an active condition of listening. It functioned as both structure and ethos, guiding decisions about duration, gesture, and technological mediation.

The performer’s body became an instrument of reciprocity, responding to environmental rhythms such as wind, tide, and the shifting play of light. Each gesture emerged from the landscape’s own tempo rather than from choreographic intention. This reorientation enacted what Kershaw (2007) describes as an ecology of performance, in which the performer participates in the vitality of the environment rather than imposing aesthetic form upon it.

In this sense, quietude generated a form of mediated eco-performativity, a bodily state that enacts coexistence, care, and temporal humility. The absence of overt action heightened the perceptibility of subtle phenomena: the movement of grasses, the resonance of rock surfaces, the oscillation between sound and silence. Stillness became a medium through which both performer and audience could sense the continuity between human and non-human presences.

4.3 Mapping Affective Landscapes: The Cartography of Quietude

A key methodological and artistic outcome of the project was the development of a cartography of quietude, mapping emotional and spatial correspondences within the geopark (Figure 2). Eight affective characteristics (calm, conciliation, contemporisation,¹ contentment, equanimity, introspection, relaxation, and safety) were identified through field immersion and phenomenological reflection. These terms served as conceptual coordinates, linking inner states of perception to external features of the environment.

Figure 2

Conceptual and sensory mapping of e depois longo tempo {quietude}. (Frederico Dinis, 2024).

This mapping process yielded the conceptual structure of the performance, organised into five interconnected movements, each exploring a distinct interplay between emotional tone, spatial context, and audiovisual rhythm. This structure not only provided compositional coherence but also illustrated how affective and ecological dimensions of place are mutually constitutive. The geopark was thus reimagined as a living sensorium, where geological and emotional layers coexist within the same temporal field.

4.4 Audiovisual Performativity and Temporal Transformation

The live performance component revealed how audiovisual mediation can extend the boundaries of embodied perception. During each presentation, the performer operated as both narrator and performer, mixing recorded material (field recordings, ambient soundscapes, and projected visuals) in real time. The process was deliberately improvisational, allowing spontaneous correspondences between sensory elements to emerge.

The sound design integrated low-frequency drones derived from coastal recordings with delicate ambient textures from mountain and river environments. These sounds were modulated through live looping and digital filtering, creating evolving soundscapes that mirrored the slow metamorphosis of the landscape. Moments of near-silence punctuated the performance, functioning as temporal thresholds that reoriented the audience’s attention.

Visually, the performance employed long-take video sequences and still-image projections that privileged texture and duration over narrative (Figure 3). Geological formations, water reflections, and shifting light were presented in extended timeframes, allowing the viewer to inhabit the slowness of perception. The juxtaposition of live sound and image manipulation created what Dixon (2007) calls a ‘digital palimpsest’, i.e., a layering of real and mediated temporalities that blurred distinctions between presence, memory, and imagination.

Figure 3

Frame of e depois longo tempo {quietude}. (Frederico Dinis, 2024).

Through this interplay of audio and visuals, the performance space became a place of temporal suspension, where human time converged with geological and ecological time. The ancient formations and slow-moving processes of the geopark resonated through the technological apparatus, establishing digital performance as a bridge between different temporal scales. Watching and listening became an act of environmental contemplation, aligning artistic perception with the Earth’s own temporal rhythms.

4.5 Audience Experience and Cultural Ecosystem Services

Audience feedback and reflective accounts indicate that the work elicited profound affective and sensory responses. Participants frequently described sensations of calm, safety, and belonging, echoing the project’s conceptual vocabulary. These emotional resonances demonstrate how artistic practice can generate CES.

The performance setting, a minimal configuration of sound, projection, and presence, encouraged audiences to adopt a contemplative mode of perception (Figure 4). Rather than passive spectatorship, viewing became a shared ecological act of attention, fostering empathy and attunement. This aligns with Berleant’s (1992) theory of aesthetic engagement, in which art functions as an experiential bridge between human and environmental systems.

Figure 4

Audience at e depois longo tempo {quietude} performance. (Frederico Dinis, 2024).

The affective outcomes of quietude thus provide qualitative evidence that artistic experiences contribute to cultural sustainability (Soini and Birkeland 2014). By cultivating sensitivity and belonging, the work supports a deeper connection to the values embedded in the geopark’s heritage, its geological continuity, cultural memory, and ecological balance.

4.6 Artefacts and Documentation

A significant dimension of the findings concerns the afterlife of the performance through its documentation. Each stage of the process produced artefacts, sound compositions, photographs, and video excerpts that function both as research data and autonomous works. These materials preserve the ephemeral phenomena of quietude while transforming them into accessible formats for dissemination and further reflection.

Documentation was not conceived as secondary or archival but as a performative extension of the work. The process of recording, editing, and curating audiovisual material constituted an additional layer of meaning, reinforcing the project’s theme of temporal continuity. Digital artefacts act as mediators of memory, translating embodied experience into a distributed form of presence (Dinis 2024). In this way, quietude continues to operate within digital space, sustaining the perceptual ethos of stillness beyond the live event.

Ultimately, e depois longo tempo {quietude} reveals that to engage the world through art is to participate in its unfolding, i.e., to listen, to wait, and to dwell within the delicate interplay of time, matter, and perception. In doing so, it affirms that the intersection of body, space, and technology remains a fertile terrain for reimagining how artistic practice can sustain both cultural and planetary vitality.

5.1 Reframing Perception: Quietude as an Aesthetic and Ethical Practice

Within e depois longo tempo {quietude}, quietude is not conceived as a representational theme or atmospheric effect, but as an aesthetic and ethical practice that actively reframes perception. Rather than denoting absence or withdrawal, quietude operates as a condition of perceptual availability, enabling heightened attentiveness to temporal, spatial, and relational nuances. This understanding resonates with phenomenological accounts of perception as an embodied and situated process, in which meaning arises through lived engagement with the world rather than through detached observation (Merleau-Ponty 1962).

As an aesthetic practice, quietude foregrounds stillness and duration as generative forces within performative experience. These qualities disrupt habitual modes of attention shaped by acceleration and constant sensory stimulation, allowing perception to unfold gradually and relationally. Drawing on Dewey’s (1934) conception of aesthetic experience as an integrative process grounded in continuity between organism and environment, quietude facilitates a mode of encounter in which perception, affect, and meaning emerge through sustained engagement rather than immediate apprehension.

Quietude also assumes an ethical dimension insofar as it reshapes how bodies relate to one another and to their surroundings. By suspending performative excess and prioritising attentive presence (Dinis 2023), the work cultivates a form of ethical responsiveness grounded in listening and receptivity. In this sense, quietude aligns with Fischer-Lichte’s (2008) understanding of performance as an event constituted through relational feedback loops, in which perception and meaning are co-produced by performers, audiences, and environments.

Within the framework of artistic research, quietude functions not as a predefined concept but as a performative condition through which knowledge emerges in and through practice. As Borgdorff (2012) argues, artistic research generates situated and embodied forms of knowing that resist abstraction and instrumentalisation. Quietude, in this context, operates as a critical strategy that recalibrates perceptual habits and ethical orientations, enabling environments to be sensed not as passive settings but as active, relational fields.

By reframing perception through stillness, duration, and attentiveness, e depois longo tempo {quietude} positions quietude as a practice that bridges aesthetic experience and ethical reflection. It invites audiences to inhabit time and space differently, fostering an embodied awareness attuned to the subtle dynamics of place, memory, and more-than-human presence.

5.2 Digital Mediation as Ecological Interface

Digital mediation within e depois longo tempo {quietude} is not conceived as a representational layer imposed upon the landscape, but as an ecological interface through which relations between bodies, environments, and temporalities are reconfigured. Rather than functioning as a tool of visualisation or amplification, digital technologies operate as mediating agents that shape how place is perceived, sensed, and inhabited. This perspective aligns with approaches that understand media not as neutral channels but as material and relational processes embedded within ecological systems (Parikka 2015; Gabrys 2020).

In the context of the performance, audiovisual technologies extend perceptual capacities while simultaneously foregrounding their own material presence. Sound processing, image manipulation, and temporal modulation do not aim to create immersive spectacle, but to subtly recalibrate attention, directing perception towards micro-variations in texture, rhythm, and duration. In this sense, digital mediation functions as an interface that brings into relation human and more-than-human agencies, allowing geological, environmental, and cultural temporalities to intersect within the performative event.

This ecological understanding of digital mediation resonates with artistic research perspectives that emphasise process over product and relationality over representation. As Borgdorff (2012) argues, knowledge produced through artistic practice emerges from situated interactions between materials, technologies, and embodied experience. Within quietude, digital tools become part of the performative ecology, co-shaping the conditions under which perception and meaning arise.

Moreover, the use of digital mediation reinforces the relational dynamics described by Fischer-Lichte’s (2008) concept of the autopoietic feedback loop. The performer’s real-time manipulation of sound and image responds not only to the site and its material conditions, but also to the presence and attentiveness of the audience. Digital mediation thus participates in a reciprocal process in which perception is continuously modulated through feedback between bodies, technologies, and the environment.

By positioning digital technologies as ecological interfaces rather than representational devices, e depois longo tempo {quietude} resists instrumental and extractive uses of media. Instead, mediation becomes a practice of attunement—one that supports attentive listening, perceptual openness, and an ethical orientation towards place. In this way, digital mediation contributes to an expanded ecological sensorium, enabling audiences to encounter the landscape as a dynamic relational field shaped by both technological and environmental agencies.

5.3 Temporal Depth: Performance, Memory, and Deep Time

Temporal depth within e depois longo tempo {quietude} emerges through the intersection of performance, memory, and geological duration. Rather than conceiving time as a linear or homogeneous sequence, the work mobilises performance as a means of articulating layered temporalities in which embodied presence, cultural memory, and deep geological time coexist. This approach aligns with understandings of performance as a temporal event that activates memory not as representation, but as lived and re-enacted experience (Taylor 2011).

Through extended duration and minimal action, the performance foregrounds time as something that is sensed and inhabited rather than measured. Stillness and slowness allow perceptual attention to drift across temporal scales, encouraging an awareness of the longue durée embedded within the landscape of the Geopark. This experiential engagement resonates with phenomenological accounts of temporality as an embodied process, in which perception unfolds through the intertwining of past, present, and anticipated futures (Merleau-Ponty 1962).

Performance, in this context, functions as a temporal mediator capable of bringing deep time into experiential proximity. The geological strata of the site, formed over hundreds of millions of years, are not narrated or illustrated, but indirectly encountered through sensory and affective modulation. This temporal mediation does not collapse differences in scale; rather, it sustains a tension between human temporality and geological duration, allowing their coexistence to be felt without being resolved.

The performative event also engages cultural memory as an active force shaping perception. Drawing on Taylor’s (2011) distinction between the archive and the repertoire, the work situates memory within embodied practices and gestures that unfold in the present. Memory thus becomes a dynamic process, continually reactivated through performance and reception, rather than a fixed repository of past meanings.

Within the framework of artistic research, this articulation of temporal depth contributes to situated forms of knowledge that resist abstraction. As Borgdorff (2012) suggests, artistic research produces knowledge through temporal processes that are inseparable from practice. By intertwining performance, memory, and deep time, e depois longo tempo {quietude} offers a mode of temporal attunement that enables audiences to sense the landscape as a palimpsest of overlapping durations, fostering an embodied understanding of place grounded in both cultural and geological temporality.

5.4 Stillness, Emotion, and Trans-Corporeality

Within e depois longo tempo {quietude}, quietude operates not as emotional neutrality or withdrawal, but as a condition through which affective and corporeal relations are intensified. By minimising overt action and emphasising sustained presence, the performance creates a perceptual environment in which emotions emerge subtly, through bodily resonance rather than expressive display. This approach aligns with phenomenological accounts of embodiment in which affect is understood as arising from the body’s situated engagement with its environment (Merleau-Ponty 1962).

Stillness in this context enables a form of emotional attunement that exceeds individual subjectivity. As the performer’s restrained gestures and the slow unfolding of audiovisual material invite attentive reception, emotions circulate across bodies and space, forming a shared affective field. This process resonates with Fischer-Lichte’s (2008) understanding of performance as a relational event generated through feedback loops, where affect and meaning are co-produced by performers, audiences, and environmental conditions.

The notion of trans-corporeality emerges here not as a theoretical abstraction, but as an experiential condition enacted through performance. The porous boundaries between bodies, technologies, and landscape allow sensations and emotions to traverse individual corporeal limits. In this sense, the work foregrounds the interdependence of human and more-than-human agencies, situating emotional experience within a broader ecological field rather than confining it to the interiority of the subject.

Performance also activates memory as an affective force that contributes to this trans-corporeal dynamic. Drawing on Taylor’s (2011) distinction between archive and repertoire, emotional resonances are not stored or represented, but enacted and transmitted through embodied presence. Emotions thus become part of a living repertoire that unfolds in the present, shaped by place, duration, and shared attentiveness.

Within the framework of artistic research, these affective and trans-corporeal dimensions constitute a form of situated knowledge. By engaging stillness as a catalyst for emotional resonance and trans-corporeal connection, e depois longo tempo {quietude} articulates an ecological mode of feeling in which perception, emotion, and environment are inseparably intertwined.

5.5 Artistic Research as Ecological Praxis

Within e depois longo tempo {quietude}, artistic research is articulated not as a method applied to an external object, but as an ecological praxis emerging through situated engagement with place, bodies, and technologies. Knowledge is generated through the unfolding of practice itself, where perception, action, and reflection remain inseparable.

As an ecological praxis, the work foregrounds relationality over representation. The performance does not seek to illustrate environmental concepts or convey predefined messages, but to activate conditions in which ecological relations can be sensed and experienced. This approach resonates with phenomenological perspectives that understand perception as a co-constituted process involving bodies and environments. By engaging with the Geopark as a dynamic and living context, the practice situates artistic research within an ongoing dialogue between human and more-than-human agencies.

Performance further functions as a site where ecological relations are enacted and negotiated in real time. Drawing on Fischer-Lichte’s (2008) notion of the performative event as a relational process sustained through feedback loops, the research unfolds through interactions between performer, audience, technologies, and site. Memory, embodied presence, and temporal depth, understood through Taylor’s (2011) distinction between archive and repertoire, contribute to this praxis by situating knowledge within lived, repeatable, and transformative experience. In this sense, e depois longo tempo {quietude} positions artistic research as an ecological practice that cultivates attentiveness, care, and ethical responsiveness as integral dimensions of knowledge production.

5.6 Towards an Ecology of Attention

The notion of an ecology of attention emerges in e depois longo tempo {quietude} as a synthesis of the perceptual, temporal, and relational processes activated throughout the performance. Attention is not treated as an individual cognitive resource, but as an embodied and situated practice shaped by relations between bodies, technologies, and environments. This understanding aligns with phenomenological accounts in which perception and attention are inseparable from bodily presence and lived experience (Merleau-Ponty 1962).

Within the performative context, stillness and duration operate as conditions that recalibrate habitual modes of attention. By suspending rapid transitions and sensory overload, the work invites a form of attentive presence attuned to subtle shifts in sound, image, and spatial resonance. This reconfiguration of attention unfolds through the relational dynamics described by Fischer-Lichte’s (2008) concept of the autopoietic feedback loop, in which performer, audience, and environment mutually shape the unfolding of the event.

Digital mediation plays a critical role in this ecology of attention by modulating perception without dominating it. Rather than demanding focus through spectacle or immersion, audiovisual technologies function as supports for attentive listening and perceptual openness. In this sense, attention is distributed across human and technological agencies, forming a shared perceptual field in which meaning emerges relationally rather than being imposed.

From the perspective of artistic research, an ecology of attention constitutes a mode of knowledge production grounded in situated experience. As Borgdorff (2012) argues, artistic knowledge arises through practice and reflection, remaining open, processual, and resistant to instrumentalisation. Attention, in this context, becomes both a methodological condition and an outcome of the research, shaping how environments are sensed and understood.

Finally, the ecology of attention articulated through quietude resonates with contemporary concerns regarding the erosion of attentiveness in technologically saturated environments. As O’Neill (2019) suggests, attention is increasingly shaped by competing demands and temporal compression. Against this backdrop, e depois longo tempo {quietude} proposes stillness and duration as critical practices that foster ethical and ecological forms of attention, enabling audiences to inhabit time and place with greater care, sensitivity, and responsiveness.

6.1 Aesthetic and Methodological Synthesis

This research has explored how audiovisual performativity can operate as both an aesthetic and methodological framework through the site-specific creation e depois longo tempo {quietude}, developed within VCLAG. By integrating artistic practice and critical reflection, the project demonstrates how quietude functions simultaneously as theme, method, and performative condition. Stillness, duration, and attentional openness are not treated as formal devices alone, but as modes of inquiry through which embodied and ecological knowledge emerges.

The synthesis between art-based research and phenomenological engagement reinforces the capacity of artistic practice to generate situated forms of understanding. Through iterative cycles of site immersion, audiovisual composition, and live performance, the research articulates a methodology grounded in listening, care, and reciprocity. This approach confirms artistic research as a legitimate and productive mode of ecological inquiry, capable of addressing complex relationships between body, space, and environment.

In this sense, site-specific audiovisual performance functions as a mode of transmission of natural-cultural heritage, not through representation or documentation, but through embodied and situated experience.

6.2 Technology and the Sensorium of Ecology

The project repositions digital technology as an integral component of ecological perception rather than as a mediating layer that distances the body from landscape. Audiovisual tools function as perceptual extensions, enabling a heightened sensitivity to environmental rhythms, textures, and temporalities. By adopting strategies of minimal intervention, the work resists technological excess and foregrounds the sensorium as a relational field in which body, technology, and environment co-evolve.

This understanding challenges instrumental conceptions of technology and aligns with contemporary debates that frame digital mediation as embedded within ecological systems (Parikka 2015). Within quietude, technology contributes to the cultivation of an expanded sensorium, facilitating modes of listening and seeing that deepen embodied engagement with place. In this sense, digital media become agents of ecological attunement rather than instruments of control.

6.3 Final Reflections

e depois longo tempo {quietude} articulates quietude as a critical condition through which contemporary performance can engage ecological complexity beyond representational or instrumental frameworks. Rather than offering solutions or narratives of environmental urgency, the work foregrounds modes of attention that allow relationships between body, landscape, and technology to unfold through presence, duration, and sensory attunement. Quietude thus emerges as an active and generative state, capable of sustaining ethical engagement through restraint and care.

From this perspective, performance is a space in which ecological awareness is enacted rather than communicated. The relationships formed between the performer, the environment, digital mediation and the audience create a shared field of perception in which meaning remains open, contingent and contextualised. This openness challenges the finality often associated with didactic or exploitative approaches to environmental discourse, instead offering a way of understanding that is experiential, emotional, and embodied.

By situating artistic research within a specific natural-cultural landscape, the project demonstrates how ecological thought can be grounded in local contexts while remaining conceptually expansive. The Viana do Castelo Littoral Aspiring UNESCO Global Geopark is engaged not as an illustrative case but as a living environment whose geological depth, cultural memory, and sensory qualities actively shape the research. In this sense, the work affirms the potential of site-specific artistic practice to contribute to broader ecological debates through situated, practice-based knowledge.

Ultimately, quietude proposes an ecology of attention as both an artistic and ethical horizon for contemporary practice. Through embodied stillness and mediated listening, the performance enacts the non-material values commonly associated with Cultural Ecosystem Services, such as aesthetic experience, emotional resonance, and sense of place, without translating them into instrumental or evaluative frameworks. In a cultural moment marked by acceleration, saturation, and environmental precarity, the cultivation of attentiveness becomes a form of resistance and responsibility. Through embodied stillness and mediated listening, the project suggests that care for environments begins not with action alone, but with the capacity to remain present, receptive, and responsive to the more-than-human worlds we inhabit.