Alexandre Estrela: RedSkyFalls

Commissioner Américo Rodrigues, Directorate-General for the Arts (DGARTES) 
Exhibitor Alexandre Estrela 
Curators Ana Baliza and Ricardo Nicolau.

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).

About the exhibitor of the Portuguese Pavilion
Alexandre Estrela is an artist whose work explores the perception of still and moving images through the manipulation of objects and projections, in search of a poetic language. He is Portugal’s official representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale, with the multimedia installation RedSkyFalls. Recent solo exhibitions include A Natureza Aborrece o Monstro, Culturgest, Lisbon (2024); Flat Bells, MoMA, New York (2023); All and Everything, Museo Rufino Tamayo (2020); Roda Lume, MuHKA, Antwerp (2016); Pockets of Silence, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015); and Meio Concreto, Serralves Museum, Porto (2013).

About the curators of the Portuguese Pavilion
Ana Baliza is a curator, designer, and editor. She is the curator of the Portuguese Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. She co-directs the farO programme (since 2022), previously known as Oporto (2012–2020), a platform for artistic research and dissemination. At the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, she curated Robin Fior’s first exhibition (2019) and served as artistic director of dança não dança (2024). She is the founder of “Amigos de”, a society dedicated to preserving rare artist species. 

Ricardo Nicolau is a curator and editor. He is the curator of the Portuguese Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Since 2006, he has been Deputy Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, where he curates solo exhibitions—including those by Ricardo Valentim, Nora Turato, Von Calhau!, and Charlotte Moth—and collection-based shows, notably Zéro de Conduite, 2018; Auto-edição no Porto, 1999–2019, 2019; Que sais-je?: Livros e edições de artista, CAPC Bordeaux, 2015 / Serralves, 2016; and Auto dos Anfitriões, 2026. At Serralves, he has also organised O Museu como Performance since 2015. He has collaborated with Ana Jotta on the publications Jotta Dossier (2009), Entrevista Perpétua (2017), and Ana Ana Ana (2024).

About the organizer of Survey on an S Wave 
Marco Bene is a curator and researcher. Organizer of Survey on an S Wave for the Portuguese Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. He was a researcher in the Art and Curatorial Practice programme at The New Centre for Research & Practice. Selected projects include João Maria Gusmão’s Animal Farm (2024, 99 Canal/ZDB); Alexandre Estrela’s Electrified Shadow Pictures (2022, MoMA); and caebd (Foreign & Domestic and the Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, 2025), part of an ongoing five-part curatorial project.

About Portugal’s participation
Portugal has participated regularly in the International Art and Architecture Exhibitions of La Biennale di Venezia since the 1980s; without a permanent pavilion, its official representation is largely nomadic. This year’s exhibition takes place at Fondaco Marcello (from the Arabic funduq), an old merchant warehouse on the Grand Canal, historically linked to the storage and trade of goods such as tobacco and silk. This venue previously hosted Portuguese contributions to the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Ângela Ferreira (2007), João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva (2009), and Francisco Tropa (2011).

About the commissioner 
Directorate-General for the Arts (DGARTES) is the body of the Portuguese Republic that coordinates and implements policies to support the arts in Portugal, with a focus on promoting and enhancing artistic creation, as well as ensuring universal access to the arts. As part of its strategic mission to promote Portuguese artistic creation internationally, DGARTES aims to affirm the talent, diversity, and relevance of Portuguese creators in prestigious cultural contexts worldwide. DGARTES is responsible for commissioning Portugal’s representation at the International Art and Architecture Exhibitions of La Biennale di Venezia, among the most relevant and renowned international stages for contemporary art and architecture, following the strategic guidelines defined by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport within the scope of External Cultural Action.

Press contacts
International press enquiries
Close Encounters PR, Nadia Fatnassi, T. +33 652 086 908,  nadia@closeencounters.fr.  

Portuguese press enquiries
Beatriz Vasconcelos, T. +351 915 379 441, beatrizvasconcelosp@gmail.com.
 
Enquiries about the artist and the work
alexandre.estrela.atelier@gmail.com, press@travesiacuatro.com.
 
Press resources: Press Kit.