Once there was and once there was not

Sited in the footprint of a former church hospital, the work is made up of multiple hand-made tiles, collectively produced with local people. Silva worked with the last remaining factory in Portugal that uses moulds to hand-make bricks and tiles from locally sourced clay using a wood-fired kiln. The collective production of the tiles, through a workshop led during the festival in 2023, follows other of her recent works that focus on intergenerational forms of knowledge exchange. The shape of the tile references a form found in human and animal architecture; protection and thermoregulation for buildings and bodies.