The first edition of the nova vaga Award selected three artists from or living on any of the islands of the Azorean archipelago to support the production of new works to be exhibited in Ponta Delgada: Isabel Medeiros (São Miguel, Joana Albuquerque (São Miguel) e Sofia Rocha (Terceira).

The fruit of a prolonged work in time and space, of encounters and exchanges between proximity and distance, the exhibition magmatic bodies presents the results of all the processes, individual and collective, which sought to think the Azorean islands as a place of dis/belonging, of continuity between nature and humanity, of specific relationships between place and body. A collaborative residency in São Miguel took the artists and curator to places where different relationships are established between inhabitants and habitat: places of rest between the sun and the sea water; sites of vigorous geological extraction for countless purposes; interstices between the rigidity of the stone and the fluidity of the water that bursts out of it; lakes of hot sulphuric water that bring to the surface the fluids of the earth that soften our skin.

All across the island we explored how the body's relationship with stone was born out of touch, quickly turning into a constructive drive to select, uproot, move, relocate and erect (houses, walls, shelters, community spaces). Based on this knowledge of and through the integumentary system (set of structures that form the outer covering of living beings), of what can only be discovered with the friction between the skin of the body and the skin of the Earth, we understand how holding a stone or embracing a rock is a moment of intimacy with the past of the place, where time unfolds to emerge crystallized in the present - simultaneously history and life, felt, experienced, touched. If the landscape is the skin of the earth, so too is the body a landscape that the earth has sculpted for consciousness to inhabit the world, and in each stone as in each hand there are constellations of affinities to be discovered.