vibrant matter: studies for unstill life (2025)



Hybrid media installation, FBAUL Gallery, Lisbon, PT

Repurposed objects, fruits, natural flowers, artificial flowers, wood base, arduino microcontrollers, wiring, breadboards, bioelectric sensors, step motors, motor controller modules, custom programming





In Vibrant matter: Studies for unstill life fruits, flowers, utensils, and ornamental elements are arranged in a composition that visually evokes the pictorial tradition of still life. The composition is embedded with deliberately visible circuitry, microcontrollers, sensors and motors.


Sensors, in the form of standard electrodes, detect subtle fluctuations in electrical potential variations of elements in the composition.The sensors’ readings may result from variations in moisture, temperature, or the presence of human touch, as well as from less perceptible phenomena — such as organic decay, ambient air movement, light conditions, or the silent presence of other bodies, living or inert. These micro-signals, processed in real time, activate motors that prompt objects to tremble, tilt or reorient, initiating a non-linear continuous responsiveness.



The installation does not merely animate still life but reimagines it as a living system — a site where representation is a co-constituted event. Time is not external to the image but enfolded within it, made visible through hesitation, repetition, and drift.


Thus, the work invites a “durational gaze” that attends to emergence rather than form, and recognises instability not as failure but as generative potential. In resisting compositional closure, the work gestures towards a way of seeing attuned to subtle shifts and relational entanglements. Matter becomes the co-creator of its own expression, destabilising conventional notions of authorship and representation, and disrupting any stable boundary between agent and environment.




Visually, the installation departs from the static idealisation of classical painting, introducing an instability that questions the still life genre’s traditional emphasis on control, symbolism, and death-as-suspension. Instead of fixity and silence, the image becomes temporal, porous, and vibrant — a still life that refuses stillness.


The gentle shifts and tremors within the composition render it always slightly out of frame, caught in the act of emerging. This produces a form of image that is contingent and processual, where the aesthetic value no longer lies in a static visuality, but in the perceptual attention to change, interrelation, and delay. As such, the work proposes a rupture with the notion of the composed image as closed or complete. Here, representation moves towards expression — not fixed, but contingent upon environmental conditions, agencies, and behaviours.



Matter vibrates — not solely in the poetic sense, but ontologically. As Jane Bennett (2010) proposes, vitality is not the exclusive property of the living. All matter pulses with potential, exerting force and forming assemblages beyond human control or perception. This ontological proposition reorients our engagement with the material world, moving from a conception of matter as defined by intrinsic properties to one in which matter’s ontological status emerges through its capacities to act and affect.


Being, from this standpoint, is not a pre-existing state but a consequence of material activity — what matter is, is inseparable from what it does. Vibrant matter is, above all, an ethical and aesthetic proposition: that matter, when listened to — or allowed to move itself — produces forms of knowledge and sensibility that escape anthropocentric frameworks. In refusing stillness, the work refuses closure. It remains in a state of becoming, and mutual affectation.