From the Sea, the Land: The Despensas of Rabo de Peixe

From the Sea, the Land: The Despensas of Rabo de Peixe is a video installation by Rubén Monfort Meseguer, featuring sound design by Gonçalo Valério and curated by António Pedro Lopes. Monfort's installation invites audiences on a journey through Rabo de Peixe, exploring one of its most distinctive and authentic traditions: the Despensas dances.

More than a festive celebration, the Despensas are a space of encounter, sharing, and belonging. They are a place where tradition, devotion, and generosity go hand in hand, and where the act of giving becomes a gesture of welcome. Through music, dance, food, and togetherness, a collective experience is created and passed down from generation to generation.

Filmed in 2026, From the Sea, the Land approaches this world by immersing itself in the strength of this tradition. Through image and sound, Rabo de Peixe emerges as a vibrant and lived territory: a place shaped by the sea, labour, faith, celebration, and the relationships among those who make up the village.

The installation creates an audiovisual landscape where memory and the present converge. Monfort's images capture bodies in motion, faces, spaces, and small everyday gestures. Meanwhile, Gonçalo Valério's sound design expands the experience, building a sonic dimension that envelops the viewer and brings them closer to the pulse of the place.

Between the visible and the audible, between the intimate and the collective, the installation preserves not only what is seen but also what is felt. The Despensas thus emerge as a living archive, a memory that continues to unfold through the bodies, rhythms, and people who keep it alive. These are unique dances in which tradition is inhabited, reinvented, and shared. They are an expression of a community that, through movement and celebration, affirms its identity and opens its doors to all who arrive.

From the Sea, the Land is therefore a journey into the heart of Rabo de Peixe. An attempt to look at a place through its gestures and to listen to it through its voices, rhythms, and silences. It is a dive, an invitation to enter. To stay. And, for a moment, to belong.

Ponta Delgada 2026 - Portuguese Capital of Culture