There is a lot of material that emerged in the process of creating the piece The Fright is a Whole World (2021) that remained to be explored and deepened, loose ends that weren't grasped for lack of time or because they didn't find their place in the work. Since 2023, Vera Mantero has begun a process of creating ‘micro-pieces’ based precisely on the exploration and deepening of these same materials, together with performers and collaborators present in that same The Fright, first with Teresa Silva and Santiago Tricot in A small composition exercise (2023) and now with Henrique Furtado and João Bento in __ groundsky |.

In the first of these micro-pieces, one of the elements present in the scenography of The Fright was replicated, an iron ring about 2 metres in diameter, and the two rings, together with the two performers, became the central protagonists of this austere and practically silent ‘... small exercise’ of synchrony in time and geometry in space. In __ groundsky |, another scenographic element from The Fright, but less used in this one, was chosen and also multiplied here, now by three: a ladder. In The Fright, the ladder was used because, symbolically speaking, they wanted to ‘touch the feet of the gods’. In __ groundsky | we tried to see what that would actually be like, what it would be like to touch the feet of the gods and hold up the sky, which is falling, as we all know. And so the three bodies now levitate upwards, forcing us to lift our gaze. The action lifts off the ground, the world becomes small below. Three bird-angels wander over our heads, leaving us wondering if they will come down and help us understand the turmoil of the shallow plane.

Mythical and fantastic figures appear (goddesses and gods, gargoyles, warriors...), intermediaries between above and below, performing actions-tasks-dances-sounds, in a sequence of unusual relationships between opposites. Again the astonishment, the dream, always the fright - and a material search for the unconscious. If in The Fright the words spoken seemed to materialise in games with the scenic objects, in __ groundsky | the words are already resonances in the object-bodies themselves which, with their nakedness, try to form another language in the carvings of an apparently immaterial metal. Below, we can see the agitation of the creatures, the hallucinatory rhythm, the things that, with their multicoloured speed, crash into each other, producing noises that are themselves substance, an obstacle.

The world continues to amaze and frighten, but now we want to listen to it from an interiority that, discredited, perhaps no longer passes through the human. In The Fright someone said: ‘The ground has been quietly waiting for me since I was a person’. Perhaps now it's no longer people who are waiting to touch the ground, nor is the ground already still. Perhaps it's the sky that wants the ground, and perhaps it's the only one that can achieve this coexistence of opposites, since we haven't been able to achieve it.