Margarida Mendes presents her lecture Expanded River Listening at Semibreve Festival 2024.

In 2019, Margarida Mendes sailed along the Mississippi and Tagus rivers, seeking to narrate the life and acoustic space that glide by undisturbed. These are powerful rivers, appearing to possess an unblemished robustness, yet within their currents and along their banks, they emit sounds like moans of pain that need to be heard. And Margarida Mendes heard them, measuring their toxicity and practicing a listening that also penetrated her own body. Because to listen is also to create a space for emotional and physical encounter.

A curator and researcher by vocation, Margarida Mendes’ intense practice and research focuses on ecology, art, philosophy and sound, demonstrating an inspiring transdisciplinarity. It’s no surprise that she is also deeply involved in various activist initiatives, both on land and at sea, in collaboration with numerous NGOs and academic and artistic institutions. Over the past ten years, she has developed a cycle on the sentience of plants called the “Plant thinking” that has led up to the exhibition she curated, “Plant revolution!”.

Margarida Mendes is a member of Natural Contract Lab, a transdisciplinary collective that works on restorative justice and rights of nature in several European rivers.