PORTUGAL PAVILION AT THE 61ST INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION – LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
Alexandre Estrela: RedSkyFalls
May 9 – November 22, 2026
At Fondaco Marcello

RedSkyFalls by Alexandre Estrela will represent Portugal at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Ana Baliza and Ricardo Nicolau, it will be held from May 9 to November 22, 2026. 

The artist presents a new installation that expands the logic of a homonymous 2019 work, now working as an operating system that integrates new digital beings. The project was selected for the Biennale Arte 2026, structured “In Minor Keys,” as it resonates with the piece’s quieter registers.

When the red sky falls, paradigms shift between divine providence, science as credo, data as oracle, and new obscurantist myths. Seismographs register these sideways movements, as humanity inscribes environmental and social fracture lines into the Earth’s crust. Tectonic manifestations open fissures, not only in the ground but also in thought.

RedSkyFalls proposes another way of reading—and responding to—these ruptures, grounded in the observation of an artificial ecosystem that responds in real time to near and distant events of a geophysical scale.

At the core of the system, a colony of small luminous organisms, nestled in the grooves of aluminium plates, inhabits the landscape of a computer screensaver. These prescient sensory units, the Replicas, approach disturbance through an animal, perhaps digital, ancient intuition. Just like catfish snap their tails in Japan before an earthquake, the Replicas react to underground infra-small signs and threshold vibrations so synchronously that, in a slip in perception, they collapse cause and effect.

Built from a calibrated mix of animal parts drawn from a dark cauldron, each Replica borrows its vital pulse from the beat of a heart in a fly’s leg, the wave of a fish larva’s tail, or the quiver of a rat’s whisker. A patchwork of digital animal movement engraves metal with a linear fossil. Along this pathway, light generates figures that continuously fulfill their hollow-graphic fate