The volcanic landscape is the chosen territory of inquiry for its strong telluric dimension, proximity to pulsation, and earth respiration. This exhibition is an expedition dairy, a selection of analog photographies from the biographic archive engraved on the body of Gil Mac, one of the interpreters of Cratera, a show from CiRcoLando, which decided to focus his research and part of the creation process on the Fogo Island, Cape Verde. The imaginary is immortal, immense, and poetically emphatic, transporting us to John Milton’s «Hell». Roads of lava and a deafening, thrilling, and fertile silence.

Gil Mac faces the brute and shapeless mass resulting from the volcanic action of Fogo Island. This primordial chaos geologically oppresses the body of the interpreter and is touched by the spirit eye of the photographer who fixates on this imago terrae. 2000 meters high and surrounded by the ruins of walls of a volcanic cone that collapsed long ago, we feel as if part of the geologic metamorphosis of Earth, where the inhumane is pregnant by the seed of things. Crushed by this abysmal scale, the performer sketches a titanic gesture of the symbolic pre-verbal creation, through the lonely elaboration of a ritual engraved at the magma ocean. He draws a circle with pyroclastic materials, which mirrors the Bordeira that surrounds Chã das Caldeiras, guarded by the omnipresent Pico do Fogo. This hemicycle that truncates the top of the island is transferred to the expositive space, creating a relationship of shot/reverse shot. Converging towards the center, the volcanic landscape contrasts with evidence of human occupation at the base of the volcano in the resistance and insistence of the inhabitants of Chã to make this territory seemingly inhospitable and threatening, their home. But also in the interference of the world system through the unusual presence of these foreigners in artistic residency mode, in the mundane gestures that they bring and in their bodies that become advertisements dominated by the word dressed by the fashion creations of the author — «hell will win» —, the inevitable succession of creation for destruction, the self-devouring consumption embodied through the canine ouroboros that closes the exhibition.

Gonçalo Mota