“Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake.” 

- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost 2005.

Installed within the domestic shell that now operates as 21 Corpo Santo, ‘Estou Cheia de pedras nos bolsos’ (I am full of rocks in my pockets) is a site-specific work that embodies the act of holding and filling oneself with a collective burden. The series of intertwined sculptures are bound to the ground, wrapped around the walls, and gripped to the edges of the space. They gather weight from each other in a bid to be grounded in a sense of stability and placement within the world, however, they are in fact rendered helpless in an immovable surrender.

Rebecca Solnit optimistically allegorizes the experience of ‘letting go’ to traversing landscapes and getting lost in unfamiliar locations; offering new places to situate yourself within. Inhabiting 21 Corpo Santo in central Lisbon, the forms surface reference Pedra Lioz, a limestone sourced from the River Tegus that has been used in building the city - ornamenting the streets, monuments, and stations. The sedimented layers of fossilised matter and minerals are enmeshed with history, moments that have flown through the river and have been captured. The imprinted surfaces of shedding skins and forming platelets are reaching out and renewing, like the sedimented rock that flows towards the opening, the light… the sea.

Text co-written by Maisie Maris and Chloë Louise Lawrence