STASIS

Boom Festival is one of the world’s most important psychedelic culture gatherings. Every two years, thousands of Boomers make a pilgrimage from the four corners of the world to Idanha-a-Nova to celebrate life to the sound of electronic and acoustic music.

Stasis theorizes the figure of an entity enrooted in the soil, existing in a state of perpetual sleep and whose dreams materialize Boom Festival as an experiential reality.

This presence functions as an ontological ground from which the festival is imagined to arise, positioning dreaming as a generative force that produces space, culture, and collective experience.

The site-specific work was conceived in order to evolve with the passage of time. It was digitally modelled and built resorting to MDF profiles that function as flowerbeds. Its interior is filled with humid earth, which allows its appropriation by Nature.

Birds deposit seeds that take root within the structure as the surrounding flora gradually reclaims the installation. The result is a ruin-in-becoming: an image shaped by natural cycles, contingency, and the Earth’s intelligence.

Stasis was built in 2016 beside the Dance Temple, the ritual core of Boom. After the response from the public, it was decided to become a permanent element of Boomland. It was absorbed into the landscape, where it continues to rest, enduring as part of the site’s living cosmology.

Rethorica Studio

Stasis, 2016
MDF, chicken wire, clay, sand, earth, straw and cement
400 x 800 x 208 cm