"A Cadência Insular: The Rhythm of Unstable Matter" by Joana Sá

14.03.2025 ------> 12.04.2025

"Every place you’ve ever imagined It’s real It’s a fictional city in your mind and you know every corner of it your mind is a world each of us is a place."

(Unknown author)

Each of us is an island. We emerge and submerge, we flow. There are islands that resist, there are islands that dissolve. All of them carry the weight of what once was, of what will never be, of what still vibrates in the invisible tides of time.

Each person inhabits their own rhythm. There are cadences that flow like tides, pulses that hesitate, that fold, that break. Each of us breathes in the tempo of our own silence, in the fold of our own time, in the pause that only we know. No island is immutable, yet something always persists — a contour the sea does not erase, an echo that does not fade.

Every place we imagine is real. The landscapes we carry within us draw shorelines where we have never been. Memories, fictions, fragments we gather without knowing — all of it settles, all of it shapes. What we think is lost continues to resonate.

There is no absolute isolation. Between shores there are currents, between presences there are traces, between silences there is a thread that crosses through. We move without touching, but never without affecting. Each island is a reflection, an unstable matter, a body crossed by time, by space, by the other.

Between one line and another, between a sound and a silence, there are invisible connections that run through everything — even what is never seen.

Joana R. Sá

Joana R. Sá is a Portuguese multidisciplinary artist, born in Mirandela (1993). She spent most of her life in Faro, where she currently lives and where she completed her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts and her Postgraduate studies in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of the Algarve. Later, she earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts – Drawing Specialization at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Digital Media-Art at the University of the Algarve and Universidade Aberta.

Her work unfolds through drawing as an expanded field, positioning itself conceptually as a rhizome that explores methodologies of deviation, gesture, memory, code, and language. Through a visual alphabet — records of indecipherable codes from her core — her artistic process moves between encounters and misencounters, constructions and deconstructions, territorializations and deterritorializations, materializations and dematerializations, noise and harmony, memory and unmemory.

Since 2013, she has participated in several exhibitions, including the solo shows Nuvens de Ruído (2022, Associação 289), Entre Mundos (2023, Apaixonarte), and AREPO (2024, Galeria Praça do Mar), as well as various group exhibitions such as Synchronicity (2022, Plataforma Revólver), Noroeste-Sudeste: Novas Perspectivas no Desenho (2019, Fundação Júlio Resende: No Lugar do Desenho), 289 – Um Projeto de Pedro Cabrita Reis (2018, Associação 289), and Octagonal (2017, Galeria Trem).

She is currently a resident artist at Associação 289 (Faro) and is represented by Apaixonarte (Lisbon).