What disgusts me is that it was sublime last night: Onion Fields From Above, by Miguel Ferrão Lopes

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DATE

22 Dec 2025

AUTHOR

António Figueiredo Marques

What disgusts me is that it was sublime last night: Onion Fields From Above, by Miguel Ferrão Lopes

AUTHOR

António Figueiredo Marques

Essentially, the distance between Lisbon and Cebolais de Cima, in Castelo Branco, where it originated, is 235 km: the show Digging Deeper On: Onion Fields From Above is an extended performance that covers this round trip in two parts of symbolic duration, equivalent to the distance in time. Based on existentialism (Sartre's Nausea and Vergílio Ferreira's philosophical essays) and the languages of visual and performing arts, the performance by Miguel Ferrão Lopes was presented at Teatro do Bairro on December 13th and 14th.

Sartre argues that existence precedes essence, reality precedes thought, and human volition precedes intelligence. Human beings are born empty into the world, as undefinable beings. Freedom shapes them, conditioned by concrete existence. Humans experience anguish, fear, and panic. Nausea takes over their bodies, which rebel and expose themselves in a frenzy of images, contrasting apparent slowness with visceral eagerness. Onion Fields From Above creates a dialogue between excess and illusion.

This is an unusual show (full version lasting 8 hours) that comprises fictionalization based on Miguel Ferrão Lopes, the artistic directors' actual biographies, and those of his performers and co-creators. In addition, a hybridization of artistic genres takes place: installation, performance and show, each one inviting the audience to take on different roles, such as recipient, witness, or accomplice.

The piece consists of two moments (the pilgrimage and the dinner) and two impulses (the landscape and the movement), which catapult the object and the body as essential scenic materials. The first part (4 hours) corresponds to a pilgrimage, as if the individual were taking a journey from their place of agency (choices, discoveries, identities). On this solitary path, through asceticism, the body is silent and accompanied by a soundtrack reminiscent of quarries being excavated, metallic sounds, and running water (sound creation by Fábio Musqueira and Afonso Gaspar). Along the way, other bodies are uncovered and the scene turns into a pilgrimage, a popular festival with a collective character, which culminates in a profane rave. The setting is that of a dilapidated house. The subject is mirrored in a jumble of furniture, utensils, books, wigs, clothes, papers, a Monopoly game, and photographic negatives. The house that once was is transformed into a map of memories, emotions, achievements, all in disarray. And each of these objects, touched (by color, smell, texture) and remembered, seems to suggest an invisible story.

The second part (over 4 hours long), a lengthy dinner scene that begins in an art gallery, is punctuated by a voiceover that activates and commands the four performers: run, fall, crawl, speaking to each one intimately. It culminates in a sort of apocalypse that wipes everything out over the wreckage, and the last thing to go out is the electronic voice that comes over the bodies. Maybe everything is already planned; society's puppets, of desire or power, we follow a speech that's both inside and outside that drives us. The scenes of subjugation, persecution, and scorn, oscillating between absurdity and violence, sometimes in a moving way, expose the dehumanization of contemporary life: how can I take advantage of the body and feelings of others, and of my own?

The landscape's momentum is based on spatial organization, object paraphernalia that is sometimes chaotic and sometimes scrutinized. Our retinas hold flashes. A dotted and undefined mantle that rises from the ground in dense figures, sculptures reaching high. Or, in the second part of the show, the naked and disfigured body, framed in the chariot (like a movie frame), suspended by one arm. Throughout the eight dense hours, the movement is unstoppable (except for a single breathless moment of stillness in the quivering bodies). Everything is in constant flux. Even when it seems that only the minimum is happening and then repeating itself, the truth is that nothing is ever still. The apparent immobility hides impermanence, which is the driving force, both of performance and of life. However, this inconstancy also has another side: incessant failure. The bodies try to speak, try to walk, try to disobey, and cannot. Again, and again.

After the first part's pilgrimage and having found an origin that is more ontological than explanatory in the second part, the body is a source of vitality, without concessions or good feelings. It dives into the sensory, veins are visible, the drive that is born in a muscle fascia is made explicit and displayed without shame. The masochistic body's cruelty is ever-present: it is a vital gift. And out of the minimal body springs the extraordinary body, beyond any everyday reality—but always invoked—a sublime body that wants to expand, escape, and redefine itself. It is a concrete body (that urinates, fucks, and spits) and associates itself with its otherness, summoning imaginaries, memories, and desires.

By metonymy, let us condense the durational character of the performance into a sequence. Four bodies, initially, all above ground level (as if they were gaseous, without defined boundaries), posing, exhibiting, risking between swings and hesitations, in an effect of contiguity between them. The woman's body washes itself on the ground. A black bench is straddled and stores onions. The same bench that is enjoyment. Carla Madeira, immaculate or Venus, adored and conditioned – and so many restrained, examined, and twisted canvases – is surrounded by Julian Sanchez, Gustavo Antunes, and Miguel Ferrão Lopes, all in a state of grace, howling and thriving. It is a lesson in art history, not shying away from the promiscuous, the genital, and the obscene, amoral male gaze.

And finally, onions (and in a previous show, the subject was the potato). Onions. They roll around, they are everywhere, they are stepped on, cooked. Onions and lemons are the kind of food that makes you cry. Both bitter and sour. Onions are breasts, onions are testicles; the pubic area. Existence in the essence of nakedness. Ever lurking: enchantment.

With support from DGARTES and the GDA Foundation, Onion Fields From Above, in 2026, it will be presented on February 12 at the Municipal Theater of Covilhã and on March 13 at the Fábrica da Criatividade in Castelo Branco. Miguel Ferrão Lopes will be the associate artist of the A Bela Associação in 2027-2028.

BIOGRAPHY

António Figueiredo Marques writes essays, exhibition texts and articles on the performing arts, combining artistic and theoretical components. He reflects on dramaturgical editing and modes of scenic composition, studying the visual, sound, body and intermediate dimensions of contemporary performance. He is a researcher at ICNOVA, has a PhD in Communication and Arts (NOVA FCSH) and is co-editor of the website on performing arts and expanded performativities CRATERA | Performance & Cognition. As a performer, he regularly trains with Mónica Calle, Yael Karavan, Renato Ferracini, Miguel Moreira, Tiago Vieira, Jorge Silva Melo, Miguel Loureiro, among others.

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