“The Power of the Void” is an eight-hour durational performance — the length of a standard working day — undertaken inside an abandoned concrete water reservoir on Madeira.
The artist enters the cistern alone, without food, without water, and without the possibility to leave until the full eight hours have passed. The underground space, cold and resonant, is open only to the sky above. Weather, temperature, and silence become the only external conditions shaping the rhythm of the performance.
Inside this concrete cavity, the body becomes both the medium and the site of inquiry. The performance explores how physical deprivation and confinement sharpen inner perception, how the absence of tools or resources strips artistic practice down to its most essential form: a single body negotiating with time, mind, and environment.
The cistern functions as a metaphorical chamber where doubt, resistance, and surrender continuously collide. Throughout the hours, the artist navigates a shifting inner landscape — from tension to clarity, from negotiation to letting go, from longing to break free to choosing to stay.
The work embodies adaptation in its rawest state: involuntary, uncomfortable, elemental. With no external stimuli or means of distraction, adaptation becomes both a physical task and a psychological confrontation. The body must adjust to cold, hunger, stillness, and the weight of time. The mind must adapt to solitude, circular thinking, and the friction between idea and reality. The piece exposes how transformation often emerges not from abundance but from limitation, how new internal structures form when all external ones collapse.