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Camposaz was contacted from Walk&Talk – an annual arts festival that stimulates creation in the specific cultural and geographic context of the Azores – to be part of the Festival during the mouth of July designing and building a wooden structure in one of the beautiful places of the São Miguel Island. 

The challenge was accepted and, with a team of 7 people from Italy, France and Portugal, we left for the Portuguese Island, 1500km from the coast.

In Assembling a moving island, the curator of the festival, Dani Admiss, she is asking us to rethink the concept of the island and focus on a new point of view. “Moving from the image of the island as a microcosm of containment to an expanded assemblage of many things passing through its borders and boundaries opens us a space for an island to be rethought and perhaps, even, remade.”

We decided to approach this theme by wondering what an island id, and what are these components. In front of this impressive landscape we discovered, it was necessary for us to split it, fractionate it, to try to better understand every single aspect that characterizes it: the wave’s sound, the sunlight, the sea, the sky and the islet.  The amazing natural spot mixes all these aspects on the same level, giving too much protagonism to the Islet, the real subject of the view.

After doing various tests to isolate the senses, we arrived to design five platforms that have different sensorial experiences in close contact with the landscape. Each one stimulates a sense, giving the possibility to have a different experience in the same place while trying to create a poetic travel between space and people. Each watchtower wants to link the visitor with the landscape through a sensory point of view: you can go up, inside, through, each time having something different and more and more complete.

Really interesting is the technic to build the main structure: they are made by lap joint in which the parts are overlapped and fastened with glue to have a flush surface.

Each tower has a height of 4 meters where the platform is collocated in each one on different distance from the ground. So, in the “Podio” it’s at 50 centimetres from the ground, in the “Echo” it’s up 1 meter, in the “Ilheu” 2m, in the “Caralho” 3m, disappearing in the “Flip”, creating a rhythm and a gradual growing of points of view.

Camposazian

Mariella Gentile, Maxime Mangold, Chloé Pais Daquet, Marina Vismara, José Amorim, Inês Sebastian Ugarteche, Nicola Bove.

Photographer

Filipa Couto