This participatory installation plays with the presence of body, voice and movement of the urban flâneur while walking inside a poem and simultaneously creating it in auto-poetic ways.

I. Speak me

The poetic Torontonian flâneur/auto-performer/audience enters the space and can move freely between the three interconnected spaces. First she encounters a music stand in front of a mirror with the poem to be read into a microphone. The voices of individual flâneurs are recorded into our computer system as they speak and become part of the fragmented fabric of spatial soundscape, joined by sounds from other flâneurs, birds chirping and city sounds from Lisbon - the city where Pessoa lived.

Our flâneur then walks down a narrow path towards a kinect camera. The camera recognizes the moving body and the body movements of incoming flâneurs who – through their movements - control the projection of images from the film material in the shape of their own physical silhouette, which moves along a screen hanging from the ceiling. The paper screen, hanging down in long sheets creates a subtle rustling sound and the images zoom in and out depending on the proximity of the bodies to the camera.

Now our flâneurs is already present through her physical presence, her looping voice recordings and as moving digital image.

II. Listen me

After walking down the path the flâneur enters the main space where she is confronted with a play of domestic and urban space, projected and real architecture, a winter-ragged tree branch – indicating vanishing nature in our cities – and an analog tape recorder. She can choose to listen to prerecorded readings of Pessoa’s poem of single and collaged voices of the creators of the performance-installation by turning the device on and listening to the sounds close to her ears. She will have an intimate encounter with the poem as well as with the artists but her own voice recording is also present in the space through a speaker system. Thus, all the voices merge with other recorded and real sounds.

The video projections play with both architectural structure in the exhibition space and the digitally projected spaces taken from urban Toronto.

Behind one of the screens a surreal domestic scene is set up consisting of a chair on green plastic lawn, a card box “TV” on a tripod, a pair of golden shoes, a handbag. On a blackboard in the corner words of the poem are written which are irregularly illuminated by the projection light, that goes through an opening of the card box “TV”. The flâneur moves in and out of these spaces. On one side of the room images of the film are projected on a row of large narrow windows, which allow the view into the courtyard of the building next to the exhibition space and thus merges once more the real and the virtual spaces. At the same time the flâneur can see the moving images on the other side of the paper screen, as people enter, and also listen to their voices as they speak the poem. Furthermore, we build a city silhouette with simple wooden boxes in front of another screen on which we video-map moving images from the film material while the boxes create shadows of their own material existence onto the screen which creates a layered visual image that can be seen from both sides.