Luísa Nóbrega presents Tsunami, a performance in which for eight hours she stubbornly imitates the signing of the testimony of a deaf woman who survived a tsunami, while simultaneously attempting to sing along with a soprano singing l’Extase by Claude Debussy.
During her residency, Luísa Nóbrega spent time going to classical singing classes and British sign language classes, developing two new skills in tandem. Luisa’s work is often derived from the friction that emerges in situations in which failures and lapses in communication emerge and language is on the verge of collapsing.
In this, her first live action of this long-term project, she attempts to clash the gestures of sign language and the high pitches of operatic singing while moving towards exhaustion, an awkward proposal to entangle two different forms of communication which are almost irreconcilable.
This installation was presented at Transpositions, part of the Performance as Process programme at Delfina Foundation. Luísa residency was supported from Coleção Moraes-Barbosa and Delfina Foundation’s family of individual supporters.