An audio-visual work captured on the banks of the river, close to Sao Pedro da Sul, Porto region, Portugal in July 2026. Volovan SON Residency. Guitarist lead: Giuseppe Lopopolo with an E-Bow and Juliana España Keller on the Osmose CE. Voice-over: Leticia Alejos.

The text below has been composed by Juliana España Keller and in memory of the Portugese Poet and Writer, Fernando Pessua, with an excerpt from his book: "The Book of Disquiet" (Portuguese: Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa) (1888–1935).

DARK WATERS

Artist Statement

DARK WATERS is a videowork made on the banks of the river Troco at Figueiredo das Donas, a small village in rural Portugal, where I spent days recording and listening — letting the river set the terms of my attention. The work is grounded in deep listening as a practice: not listening for something, but listening with — a durational, whole-body attunement in which the boundary between listener and environment loosens, and the river becomes an interlocutor rather than a backdrop. Water over stone, insect drone, wind in the reed beds: these are not ambience. They are utterances. The work proceeds from the conviction that nature does not simply console us; it testifies, and listening is the ethical disposition that allows its testimony to be received.

To listen this way in Portugal is to listen alongside Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa spent his life at the edge of the Tagus and dissolved the single self into a chorus of heteronyms — Caeiro, Reis, Campos — each a distinct way of standing before the world. Deep listening conjures the same dissolution: sustained attention to a river multiplies the listener, unsettling the fiction of one stable "I" who hears. Alberto Caeiro insists that nature is not a symbol to be decoded but a presence to be sensed — "parts without a whole" — and DARK WATERS takes him at his word, meeting the Troco through sensation before interpretation. Yet Álvaro de Campos' Ode Marítima hears something else in moving water: the entire clamour of Portugal's maritime past — the voyages that made saudade a national feeling and that also carried empire, the slave trade, and the violence the myth of the Discoveries keeps submerged.

DARK WATERS holds these two hearings in the same current. The river is sensory ground and unquiet archive at once: even a small rural waterway, far from Pessoa's Lisbon, flows within the same watershed of national memory, carrying the dark sediment of history in the same flow that draws the body into attunement. What deep listening conjures here is a disquiet — a desassossego — in which intimacy with nature and reckoning with history are revealed to be the same act of attention. The work asks what the water knows, and stays long enough to be implicated in the answer. in this poetic textual composition by Juliana.

"Black water where

I quiet my restless mind—

Stones hold ancient tales

The river's sounding becomes a language all its own, older than words.

In its dark surface, I see not my reflection, but the stillness beneath the current—the place where true listening begins.

According to the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, a man should not be able to see his own face

There is nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face.

And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic.

He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart"