Creating a poetic dialogue between the performer, the sculpture and the natural surroundings, this live performance uses voice and sound to activate the operatic installation ‘An Aria for the Mallard’ as a performative score.

‘The Performing Garden’ is a site-specific performance that integrates opera, art, and environmental listening into a poetic gesture of cohabitation.

Unfolding around the South Garden pond, where the installation is located, this piece traces the imagined voice of a mallard duck who chooses not to migrate. Instead, it opts to remain, to sing, to inhabit the pause of movement and to embrace hedonism.

Through voice, sound, and material presence, the work explores the friction between instinct and defiance, between movement and stillness. Soprano, composer, and the sculptural presence emerge and recede within the landscape, weaving human and more-than-human rhythms into a shared moment of resonance.

The soundscape evolves in real time, responding to the atmosphere and presence of the garden. It invites the audience into a simultaneously contemplative and sensory engagement with the installation, while reinforcing the project’s central themes of ecological interconnection and more-than-human cocreation.

Here, the garden itself and its inhabitants become uninvited collaborators, contributing to the performance in their own unique ways, opening up new modes of listening and coexisting.

This performance follows the talk ‘Voicing the More-Than-Human: An Interdisciplinary Research’, with Rosana Antolí, composer Jorge Ramos and scientists Rui Oliveira and Gonzalo de Polavieja.

This talk brings together the artist Rosana Antolí, composer Jorge Ramos and guest scientists to reflect on the collaborative process behind the installation ‘An Aria for the Mallard’.

‘An Aria for the Mallard’ is a new work by Rosana Antolí created for the Gulbenkian South Garden. It seeks to reimagine the traditional operatic form by dedicating an aria to a more-than-human subject – the mallard duck.

Using sound, sculpture, and environmental engagement, the installation highlights the interconnectedness of an ecosystem.

Following a project presentation by the artist, this discussion will explore how neuroscience and bioacoustics influenced the work’s creative process. These disciplines were applied not as theoretical background, but as tools for composition, perception and new forms of imagination.

The conversation will move through artistic process, field research, sonic experimentation, and the analysis of neural data. It will address how interdisciplinary collaboration can open new approaches to working with – and not just about – the more-than-human world.

Examining the notion of co-creation with non-human life forms, particularly through the lens of bioacoustics, it will also consider how this approach can inspire new ecological narratives.

This talk is followed by ‘The Performing Garden’, a live performance by Rosana Antolí, with soprano Claire Rocha Santos and composer Jorge Ramos.

This film charts the unfolding process behind ‘An Aria for the Mallard’, a project where opera, art, and neuroscience don't just converge, but blur and breathe as one entity.

This recording of the creative process behind Rosana Antolí’s installation weaves together fragments from intensive rehearsals, vocal explorations, deep field recordings, interviews with the collaborators, and immersive garden walks.

Unlike a conventional ‘behind-the-scenes’ narrative, this video piece is designed to reveal the intricate architecture of more-than-human co-creation. It shows how the work was shaped by a collective of voices and disciplines: soprano Claire Rocha Santos; composer Jorge Ramos; neuroscientists; the presence of birds; the teams from CAM, the Gulbenkian Culture Programme and the Gulbenkian Garden; and other natural forces.

Ultimately, it constitutes not a linear chronicle of production, but a reflection on shared authorship, exploring porous borders, where the human and the more-than-human meet – not merely in theoretical discourse, but in radical, embodied practice.