During extended stays in the Azores archipelago, Manuela Marques focused on the region’s volcanic dimension, immersing herself in it through work carried out with various scientific seismic observation institutions such as the Afonso Chaves Observatory in Ponta Delgada and the Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera on Faial Island. What matters above all is the energy at work there, its fervor, and how it tests the beings who inhabit the rugged, complex coastline. The artist described the sensations and tremors as she listened to the seismic faults. Thus, what Marques seeks first and foremost, as she says, is “to be as fair as possible with nature”. This accuracy is that of an eye that takes up the cause of that which it covets and puts itself in the place of that which it observes without verticality or anthropocentrism. It is about co-presence in the world, which includes remaining at a fair distance and paying attention to the infinitesimal, the idiosyncratic and, of course, the invisible.

When Manuela Marques speaks of the fault line (which is also the title of a photograph), she uses the expression in the geological sense of the breaking of the rock mass but also in the existential sense: the fault line is a line of bifurcation, opening up a whole metaphysics of crossroads and the pursuit of revelations through artistic work. No one is safe from an aftershock or an earthquake, which is always a shattering event. Fundamentally, what is at stake is what the artist calls a “degree of worry”, the propensity to never feel comfortably sheltered from harm. The volcano, both physically and metaphorically, is extremely unstable and inherently unpredictable, as it is capable of devastating everything in the blink of an eye, leaving us no time to completely prepare ourselves. “Volcanoes may be under constant surveillance, but we will always be behind as regards their potentially devastating action”, explains the artist. And that evokes a literary memory for me: Georges Bataille and Colette Peignot’s turbulent ascent of Etna 1937[1], which was for him the remarkable discovery of a “huge, bottomless crater” in a “gaping wound”, a “crack” of flames and ashes. Geography and the feeling of being alive communicate.

extract from the text “Conversation Atlantique” by Léa Bismuth published in the book Echoes of Nature by Manuela Marques, published by Loco (2022).