Celestial Ricenances
A performative sound and light installation by Luís Bittencourt

17 October — Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Seiça, Figueira da Foz, Portugal

Between 1917 and 1971, the Monastery of Santa Maria de Seiça held an improbable tenant: a rice-husking factory installed inside a space built for silence and prayer. The chimney that still rises above the monastery today is the clearest trace of that cohabitation — a foreign organ grafted onto a body it was never meant to inhabit, host and parasite bound together long after the machinery fell silent.

Celestial Ricenances treats the monastery itself as an instrument. Walls, gates and structural elements are struck and amplified, drawing out resonances the stone has held for centuries. Grains of rice fall from the ceiling onto a suspended stainless steel plate, contact-miked and turned into percussion — an agricultural gesture becoming sound. Four water basins, amplified through hydrophones, evoke the surrounding rice paddies and the flat-bottomed boats once built to work them, their surfaces rippling live with sound and light.

Developed during a two-week artistic residency at the Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Seiça, the installation unfolds as a living performance: Bittencourt performs live within and against the space, in dialogue with the resonating building, the water, and the falling grain — sacred and industrial, stone and rice, continuing to inhabit one another.