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Between an organism and a system: a colony+info
9 - 19 JUL
From an organism that grows and transforms itself every day, to a solar system to which new planets are joining, we chose to submerge our senses in the ocean that surrounds the fascinating islands of the Azores, and create a complex place, an ecosystem that would sustain all the "divided" that make up this year's edition. From the surface, through the water column, to the bottom of the ocean, the novelty of life forms, and the life of forms, challenge the limits of imagination. The ocean presents itself as an inspiring terrain to free ourselves from the formal and intellectual constraints that anthropocentrism places on the imagination. The siphonophores that are animal-colony question our understanding of what an individual is, the endosimbiosis between corals and zooxanthlas, the very plasticity of corals, in which individuals of the same species can have very different forms depending on the conditions of their environment, or even sexual parasitism (not a good name, it lacks imagination) like a male devil-fish, which is up to 10 times smaller than the female, after biting her in the belly in order to procreate, starts to share with her the same circulatory system. The transparent lightness and contortionist beauty of jellyfish, which become an amorphous transparent matter when out of water, or the magical quality that is bioluminescence.
As the days go by and the system becomes more complex, new beings or landscapes appear, and some are so overwhelming that they capture our full attention, sometimes the organisms are extremely small and we have to get closer to understand their size, others are giants, and on the last day we have a panorama of the ecosystem that we have been building, the colony.