Portuguese Pavilion 2026: RedSkyFalls

In seismic zones, nature can be read as a system of warnings. Frogs abandoning ponds, snakes and worms fleeing their holes, hives scattering in disarray, the sudden silence of cicadas are natural anomalies that make up a chimeric bestiary for reading terrestrial instability.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, collective surveillance of animal behaviour served as a national defence strategy against seismic threats. Farmers, zookeepers and pet owners observed, recorded and reported the atypical behaviour of Pekingese dogs and tiger parrots, which were mobilised as bio-sentinels. Throughout the Cold War, while the government focused on tracking down clandestine nuclear tests in the American desert, others studied kangaroo rats for their stable circadian cycle, which helped detect the imperceptible signs of tectonic movements. In Japan, fishermen interpreted the restlessness of catfish as a warning that the largest among them, the namazu , was attempting to free itself from beneath the Japanese islands, which would make them shake. In the 1970s, the same fish was studied in the laboratory due to its sensitivity to the electrical fluctuations that precede earthquakes, confirming what fishermen knew all along. All too reliant on the interpretation of deviations from the norm, this line of research lost momentum in the mid-1990s. The holistic view of earthquakes as a set of geophysical, socio-environmental, and sensory phenomena thus faded. RedSkyFalls revives this pre-digital sensibility in the setting of a computer desktop. Suspended there, in the seemingly still life of a mountainous landscape, we can observe the Réplicas — luminous fossil sentinels made from a mix of moving animal parts. From the pulse of the heart in a fly’s leg, the wave of a fish larva’s tail, and the quiver of a rat’s whisker, the Réplicas inherit an ancient, perhaps digital, animal intuition. Just as catfish thrash their tails in Japan on the threshold of an earthquake, the Réplicas seem to foresee or even induce tremors, so that cause and effect begin to slip. Under close observation, we can recognize in the behaviour of these artificial sentinels the infra-signals of underground disturbances that every so often erupt in their signifying world, just as on Earth, in the form of a green piercing call that forces everything into synchrony. When the red sky falls, the Réplicas react like other animal species that, unable to fight or flee, simply freeze. In the absence of terrestrial threats, they joyously resume their quiet game of life. (Text by Ana Baliza, March 2026. An extended article on RedSkyFalls will be published in Electra Magazine, issue 32, Spring–Summer 2026).

What to expect:
Installation