British electronic producer Maya Shenfeld and Portuguese visual artist Pedro Maia came to NEXT 2023 with the brand-new audiovisual performance Under the Sun, created over the course of two years between Berlin and the Portugues industrial periphery. This performance features a series of electroacoustic compositions for analogue synthesizers, wind instruments, voice and field recordings with video, created during the hottest summer to date at one of the world’s deepest marble quarries in southern Portugal. Shenfeld and Maia thematise change and repetition, the idea of so-called deep time (a geological term – perceiving time through the prism of minerals), the ephemeral moment, equilibrium, immediate closeness and threat. Their analogue arrangement pushes the boundaries of Super 8 film and drone recordings, enacting a dialogue with multilayered electronic textures.

The artwork was commissioned by Semibreve Festival (PT), together with A4, the video is produced by A4 as part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union and supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council and Bratislava City Foundation.

Video: Michal Vasiľ & Paula Díaz