Even what resists naming, what slips beyond evidence, can still be conjured. This station brings together practices that give body to the invisible, engaging with subtle presences and silenced narratives. The aim is not to explain or to fix meaning, but to open space for signs, symbols, and gestures that operate between the poetic, the spiritual, and the political. More than objects, what is presented here are invocations — fragments, altars, chants, mirages — reminding us that knowledge can also emerge from ritual imagination, attentive listening, and openness to what refuses capture.
Abundance manifests as vibration, echo, or transformation: matter that breathes, pigments that transfigure, images that return other forms of devotion and memory. These works persist in reinscribing what has been erased, reinventing rituals, fabulating alternative stories, and expanding the margins of the visible.
Works on display
Alice Visentin (New Commission)
Arcano Mistico
A roaming robotic nun that revives the life and legacy of Madre Margarida do Apocalipse, a cloistered Azorean nun and creator of the Arcano Místico—an extraordinary and mystical work composed of over 10,000 small figurines made from bread, resin, seashells, and natural pigments found on the island. Visentin reimagines this figure as a symbol of resistance and emotional expression, proposing a speculative cosmology that combines themes of childhood, make-believe, and mythic soothsaying.
Beatriz Brum
Corpos Subtis (2020–ongoing)
Brum’s work unfolds around light, exploring its materiality, limits, and forms. In Corpos Subtis, she turns to the root chakra as an entry point into a vibrational cartography of the body. Through sound, color, and movement, the installation opens space for the subtle — energetic bodies, meditative states, inner presences — invoking abundance as vibrational balance and cosmic connection.
Colectiva MALVA (New Commission)
Enchanting Lagoons: reclaiming memories, celebrating presences (2025)
Reactivating silenced memories of the Festas do Espírito Santo (Holy Spirit Celebrations) through a queer, decolonial, and feminist perspective, this work addresses the cultures, fields, and craters of Sete Cidades. It summons invisible presences and stories, proposing rituals of affection, transformation, and belonging. This installation is a precursor to a ritual action that will activate these objects during the Symposium.
Ebun Sodipo (New Commission)
The Way Her Teeth Settled
The installation is a continuation of a performance dealing with erotics: of sound, sexual desire, violence, history, and names. In which we follow Vitoria, an enslaved trans woman kidnapped from Benin and enslaved on São Miguel in 1556, as she moves from an orange grove to her home through a series of encounters, to wash and finally to sleep. Interceding this journey is a foray into the politics of the Western archive, collective memory, and the evolution of racialisation. Sodipo has created this underground altar as a devotional and sensorial space.
Gala Porras-Kim
Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (2022/2025)
The work propagates mold spores found in the British Museum’s collection, thus containing a microcosm of the more than 8000 objects that make up the world’s largest collection, including objects from the Azores. The work questions preconceived institutional logics of conservation and value. By provoking decomposition and renewal, the work marks its function as part of a natural ecosystem.
Graça Costa Cabral
Objects of Worship I–V (2009)
A series of five sculptures in iron and porcelain that explore the idea of a ritual object without prescribing function or dogma. Inspired by votive forms, mythological narratives, and devotional gestures, they inhabit a liminal space between the sacred and the secular.
Jane Jin Kaisen
Portal (2024)
A mythopoetic film inspired by the mythic creator goddess from South Korea’s Jeju Island, Seolmundae Halmang, dissolving boundaries between body, rock, sea, and cosmos. Through visual rhythms and images of this volcanic island’s intertidal zones, Kaisen invites a sensorial state of fusion and belonging, where the spiritual is embodied in matter and vibration.
Silvia Mariotti
Crystal Souls (2025)
Mariotti’s works interweave ecology, fiction, and archaeology to reflect on mutations in territories. Through imagined fossils, speculative plants, and hybrid artifacts, Mariotti activates a mineral and botanical memory of place, speculating on regenerative futures grounded in sensitive matter.
Walla Capelobo (New Commission, Selected artist – Open Call for Artists)
To Burn the Grids Away
One cannot master the earth’s time, and it is alongside the borders that once tried to dominate territories, where many were born who were meant to breathe freedom. This speculative installation sows within the imagination the promise of one day awakening alongside the volcanoes that refused to be mastered. If iron rusts and returns to ore, the day will come when the earth’s abundance returns and the monocultures become forests once again. The artist proposes, through this installation, an interweaving of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices with Azorean communal cosmologies and quilombos imaginaries.