2. Project genesis and expansion of the dispositif

I was familiar with Maria Teresa Horta’s poetry long before actually meeting its author. We first met in late 2008, and, while discussing potentially interesting projects, a first, specific trigger arrived in the following year with a commission for the Música Viva 2009 Festival: Horta proposed we work from the La Dame à la licorne universe. Beyond its beauty and iconographic fame, this ensured a compact system of figures, textures and allegorical tensions – entirely suitable for being reinterpreted across different formats.

A Dama do Unicórnio (2009) was the result, a brief autonomous piece (c. 9 minutes) built on three poems – centred around the figures of the Lady, the Maidservant and the Unicorn as depicted in the tapestries – for two spoken voices and electronics. From the outset, what drew us to this outcome did not stem from the idea of ‘illustrating’ the tapestries but rather from the scope for building a space in which voice, text and electroacoustic writing might coexist as equally active forces, sometimes converging, sometimes diverging.

Following the premiere, we decided to develop an editorial object as the next major step: a book bringing together an expanded cycle of poems and images related to the tapestry ensemble alongside an audio component (Figures 1 and 2). The volume contains around 70 poems (62 of which were set to music and included in both the accompanying audio CD and the performance), organised into titled sections – Enredo, A Arte e o Ofício, As Personagens, As Tapeçarias, Infidelidade, O Mito, À mon seul désir, Sedução, Posse, Eternidade and Final Footnote ¹ – punctuated by recurrent Ad limina sections that function as the thresholds between blocks.

Figure 1.

The cover of the Portuguese edition (2013) of A Dama e o Unicórnio (book with audio CD). Reproduction of the author’s copy.

Figure 2.

Audio CD included in the Portuguese edition (2013) of A Dama e o Unicórnio (detail of the printed side). Photograph by the author.

The book format introduced a different kind of time: re-visitable, shaped by pauses and returns, rather than the continuous, shared time of a concert. This shift mattered artistically because it enabled the work to exist not only as an event but also as an object that readers-listeners would inhabit at variable speeds. Still more importantly, this demonstrated how the project’s coherence did not depend on any simultaneity of media – reading and listening could now be partially desynchronised, allowing readers to actively compose their own trajectories. This insight became foundational for the performance and installation, where similar principles of asynchrony and threshold activation were explored under different conditions.

Furthermore, the editorial object simultaneously clearly conveyed how the project was not bound to a single mode of presentation. The very act of assembling text, images and recorded sound fostered further migrations: what changes when the voice is once again heard in co-presence, inside a room, and when sound becomes spatially distributed rather than affixed in headphones or stereo playback? This development into performance and installation unfolded in parallel, without any pre-determined single destination; the process reconfigured the conditions under which the same poetic and sonic materials could act – through visibility, distance, circulation and thresholds of attention.

This phase was not organised as a linear pipeline, i.e., text first, music afterwards. Instead, the work arose out of a reciprocal, iterative process in which poems and music mutually informed one another across writing, recording and composition. This reciprocity was not merely practical: it served to shape the aesthetic identity of the project, allowing the sonic writing to influence poetic decisions and, conversely, allowing the evolving poems to redirect musical choices. In a few instances, poems remained subject to adjustments subsequent to the recording sessions, which helps explain minor discrepancies between the printed text and the spoken versions captured in the audio – lingering traces of a deliberately open and processual mode of making.

Later derivations have confirmed this project characteristic as a field of experimentation rather than a closed work: the editorial circulation from the Portuguese edition to the French edition (Horta and Sousa Dias Reference Horta and Sousa Dias2017) (Figure 3) and the production of an autonomous electroacoustic piece without text, A Dama e o Unicórnio – Paisagem [The Lady and the Unicorn – Landscape] (composed in 2018, released online in 2021) (Sousa Dias Reference Sousa Dias2021). In the latter, the removal of words enabled observation of the extent to which the coherence of the sound world persists beyond the co-presence of the different media. This suggests that the project’s unity does not depend on obligatory simultaneity but rather on a compositional logic transposable between dispositifs.

Figure 3.

Cover of the French edition (2017) La Dame à la licorne (book with audio CD). Reproduction of the author’s copy.

Collectively, the project’s expansions across formats already portray the core reasoning of this article: coherence is not guaranteed by simultaneity but rather composed through conditions that redistribute attention and intelligibility. The next section therefore turns to the tapestry cycle as a symbolic and material matrix for these conditions.

3. Tapestries: Symbolic matrix, craft and threshold spatiality

La Dame à la licorne serves as an organisational matrix for the articulation of poetry, electroacoustic composition, staging and installation. The project relates to the tapestry cycle by translating perceptual conditions into compositional terms – layering and simultaneity, micro-detail and density, controlled ambiguity and a constant negotiation between symbolic charge and material presence – rather than by simply depicting images.

Surplus and ordering. The sequence of the five senses is traversed by the phrase ‘À mon seul désir’, an inscription whose interpretation remains open and variously associated with desire, renunciation and interiority (Erlande-Brandenburg Reference Erlande-Brandenburg1989; Taburet-Delahaye Reference Taburet-Delahaye2007). The project does not set out to resolve this ambiguity. Instead, it treats the phrase’s semantic opacity as a compositional surplus, preventing any reduction of the tapestries to a simple inventory of the senses and thereby legitimising ambiguity, desire and perceptual friction as operative conditions. In Maria Teresa Horta’s poetry, this openness gravitates towards an embodied and affirmative reading of desire. Seeing/touching become confused, hearing is suggested through gestures and objects, and space appears simultaneously close (the minutiae of mille-fleurs) and unreal, through the absence of perspectival depth.

Craft and material temporality. Beyond its imagery, the tapestry evokes an imaginary world of production (weaving, warp and weft, motifs and insignia) that shifts the ‘medieval’ from exoticism into craftsmanship. Maria Teresa Horta’s poetry redefines this dimension (‘Teares’, ‘Novelos’, ‘Linha e trama’, ‘Bordadura’, ‘Mille-fleurs’, ‘Motivos’ and ‘Insígnias’Footnote ² ), thereby conveying the work as an accumulation of gestures. The analogy with electroacoustic writing is operative: stratification, granulation, microvariation, textures organising layers and generating densities without saturation and avoiding easy metaphors.

From iconography to stage-space. The scenic transposition avoids any literal reconstitution and opts for stylised allusion: trees, a bench and a tent appear as function-objects. The tent, depicted in the sixth tapestry ‘À mon seul désir’, becomes a circle of light – a threshold triggering audiovisual changes and turning allegory towards the behaviour of the dispositif (activation by proximity). The mille-fleurs suggests spatial writing: a field without perspectival hierarchy, traversed by distributed micro-events and textures in which detail does not lead to climax, supported by spatialisations that suggest field rather than direction.

Corpus shifts. The project maintains coherence through allusions and derivations (Narcissus, Delilah, Helen of Troy), expanding the matrix to include mythologies of the feminine, the gaze and desire, without committing itself to a one-to-one transposition. The voice does not appear as a neutral vehicle: it becomes a place of friction between body and symbol, and the poem ‘Uma fala sem mundo’ (‘A speech without world’) moves the cycle into a zone where language confronts its own scope for meaning.

In short, the tapestry matrix articulates (i) a senses/surplus structure that organises without closing; (ii) an imaginary of craft that activates the work as making; and (iii) a threshold-based spatiality, transferable to stage and installation without falling into illustration. Consequently, the project transitions from ‘representing’ to implementing its logic of coexistence and ambiguity within a different medium.

Interpreted in these terms, the tapestry cycle does not endow any stable iconographic programme for mere illustration; it instead produces a matrix of thresholds through which ambiguity, desire and perceptual redistribution become compositional resources. This matrix operates across several levels: through an allegorical structure unsettled by the surplus of À mon seul désir; through an imaginary of craft that resonates with electroacoustic writing as material labour; and through a threshold-based spatiality (the tent, the mille-fleurs, the trees) susceptible to transposition to stage and installation. The next section turns from this matrix to the spoken voice, where these conditions are tested at the level of utterance, intelligibility and bodily presence.

4. Text and voice: Utterance, intelligibility and minimal theatricality

The decision to employ spoken voice as opposed to singing immediately delineates a particular domain of constraints and possibilities. Singing tends to integrate language into musicalised prosody; recitation keeps semantics and syntax active while exposing the materiality of speech – breath, articulation, rhythm, hesitation and silence. This choice does not correspond to a ‘zero degree’ of expression but rather to a compositional and scenic decision that places the word in a state of vulnerability: neither protected by melody nor reduced to noise. In this sense, the spoken voice unveils what Barthes (Reference Barthes1972) termed ‘the grain of the voice’ – the materiality of the body that is heard and resists both pure semantics and ornamental musicalisation. In the Barthes formulation, the ‘grain’ is not simply timbre but embraces the bodily presence of the singer or speaker in the sound, a concept helping to distinguish our recourse to spoken voice from both ‘neutral’ recitation and operatic vocalisation.

In the performance, recitation is regarded as a minimal form of action. The performer does not ‘play’ characters or dramatise the text; she rather works with a restrained economy of gestures and inflections that audibly depicts the boundary between speaking and acting. This minimal theatricality functions as a means of resistance to two symmetrical excesses: the illustrative dramatisation of the poem, on the one hand, and the ‘literary’ neutralisation of the voice, on the other. Therefore, the act of speaking may emerge as a form of presence whereby a body becomes exposed without any intention of display or ostentatious flaunting.

The coexistence of spoken voice and electronics renders a compositional parameter intelligible. Even when the voice is audible, the spectral density and attentional dynamics of the music may displace the listener’s focus, turning the text into a peripheral presence. A Dama e o Unicórnio explores this tension variably: moments in which the music creates a breathable frame for the poem alternate with moments of friction when listeners are forced to negotiate between following the words and following sonic matter. The work thus rejects a pacified solution by treating intelligibility as relational rather than absolute.

This position contains political implications, especially when applied to Maria Teresa Horta’s poetry. Her writings affirm desire and the body as places of resistance (Horta, Barreno and Velho da Costa Reference Horta, Barreno and Velho da Costa2010), rejecting the separation between intimacy and politics – a stance that continues to shape her critical reception (The Economist 2022) and which generated controversy in the 1970s (Time Magazine, 1973). What is said on stage does not merely ‘convey’ content; it reinscribes a position. Managing intelligibility thus becomes a negotiation between the word’s claim to be understood and music’s right to articulate its own modes of sense-making through timing, texture and intensity. This negotiation resonates with Cavarero’s (Reference Cavarero2005) account of vocality as relational singularity: the voice is not only a vehicle for semantic content but also the exposure of a speaking body to a listener. Within this framework, the management of intelligibility in A Dama e o Unicórnio is no mere technical or aesthetic problem; it actually conceives of the conditions under which speech can appear, recede, be addressed and be heard. Far from illustrating the poem, the music participates in this ethics of address by shaping – and sometimes counterpointing – micro-decisions over rhythm, timbre, breathing and distance so that meaning emerges as a situated event of listening.

Text and voice thus become structuring elements in an intermediality that plays out in the in-between (Jullien, Reference Jullien2011): not a neutral interval between media but instead a space of gestation in which gaps (écarts) between semantics and materiality, presence and retreat and different regimes of intelligibility become productive. The following sections now explore how electroacoustic composition and staging operate in these conditions, converting them into musical writing and scenic devices.

5. Electroacoustic composition: Materiality, macroform and ‘second text’

The electroacoustic writing in A Dama e o Unicórnio interrelates three interdependent planes: macroform, sound materiality and performative devices. The music operates as a second text in relation to the poem – a temporal and affective plane that engages with the poem through proximities, frictions and displacements without ever seeking to say ‘the same thing’. This concept resembles Wishart’s (Reference Wishart1996) idea of autonomous ‘sound discourse’, endowed with its own syntax and capable of establishing a material counterpoint to the verbal.

Macroform and continuity. From a formal point of view, the music does not linearly follow the poem-by-poem sequence but takes as its reference the major sections of the corpus, establishing trajectories of density, rarefaction and contrast that reach beyond textual granularity. This option allows for perceptual continuity even when certain poems are absent in certain declinations of the project, with the music then functioning as a background mirror: it does not illustrate but instead sustains the coherence of the sonic and affective universe.

Materials and processes. The sound materials derive from a set of processes guided by two main objectives: to produce continuity from fragments and to introduce textural roughness without saturation. Granulation is central to this device, allowing for the creation of continuous or rough sound fields from micro-fragments and operating on a temporal scale that, as Roads (Reference Roads2001) describes, destabilises the notion of a discrete sound event, instead generating textures and fields of sonic presence.

A second procedural axis involves the application of feedback delays, correlated with comb filters, in order to bring out pitches and chords internal to the texture, thus creating zones of tonal attraction without stabilising any functional harmony. These strategies are combined with analysis-synthesis crossing techniques, producing hybrid, unstable sound objects situated between a recognisable source and abstract synthesis. Together, these processes sustain an aesthetic of the in-between: between gesture and matter, between index and symbol.

Tools and performance device. The production deployed Csound and Max/MSP for sound generation and transformation, in addition to other software programs, alongside Pro Tools for editing. For the performance, a dedicated instrument was developed in Max/MSP, designed as a multiple reading system: up to four files can be activated simultaneously and distributed in real time across six channels (Figure 4). This architecture favours writing in moving layers and trajectories of approach and departure in which spatialisation becomes an active scenic component – an approach that dialogues with previous research on improvised electroacoustic performance and spatialisation, including that developed in the Vertiges de l’espace (Couprie and Sousa Dias, Reference Couprie, Sousa Dias and Ayari2015) and Vertiges de l’image (Sousa Dias, Reference Sousa Dias, Soveral, Santana and Ferreira2015) projects.

Figure 4.

Interface of the Max/MSP performance instrument for managing electronics and multichannel diffusion; additional control via a MIDI controller (Evolution UC33). Screenshot by the author.

The second text and the politics of friction. Music functions as a second text insofar as it alternates between two complementary behaviours: framing, creating breathing space for speech; and tension, creating friction and shifting attention. The poem’s intelligibility is not approached as an absolute value but rather as a parameter for managing in accordance with that at stake in each section.

This dramaturgy of densities takes risks: whether becoming too opaque for listeners less familiar with electroacoustic practices or, conversely, too discreet and decorative should the friction become excessively attenuated. Therefore, this project’s coherence depends on a traceable macroform in which spectral emergences, silences and changes in texture function as perceptual markers. Hence, the ‘second text’ neither replaces nor comments on the poem; instead, it summons the poem to reconfigure itself in listening.

What matters here is not only the description of electroacoustic processes but also the ways they allow music to operate as a second text: framing, displacing and, at times, being in friction with the poem while composing intelligibility as a variable relationship. The next section extends this logic to the visible domain, where staging redistributes visibility, agency and sonic attention in space.

6. Staging as a compositional device

The staging of The Lady and the Unicorn was conceived so as to engage with the tapestry universe without any literal representation, to preserve the centrality of poetic utterance, to avoid direct allegorical equivalences between performers and symbolic figures and to integrate light, projection and spatialisation into a perceptually coherent system. In this context, staging functions as a compositional device: decisions about visibility, the distribution of actions and hierarchies of attention that reorganise the relationship between text, sound and space. This perspective aligns with previous reflections on ‘theatre-music’ as a performative practice (Sousa Dias Reference Sousa Dias, Madeira, Oliveira and Marçal2020) that understands staging as active mediation rather than illustration.

A structural decision separates the actress on stage from the electronic performer in the audience. This layout defines zones of attention and thresholds (entrance, central axis, stage, performer’s position), functioning as a spatial writing that conditions how the dispositif is heard and read (Figure 5). This also discourages simplistic allegorical readings (the actress as a represented figure; electronics as ‘character’) and reinscribes electronics as an operative, non-representational agency, verging on Phelan’s (Reference Phelan1993) ‘politics of the unmarked’. Furthermore, the performer’s position also enables the mediation of stage time (through entrances, transitions and densities) without invading the visual field of action.

Figure 5.

Performance layout: audience entrance, stage direction, location of the electronics performer and the “light tent” and placement of stage objects and loudspeakers in the room. Diagram by the author (reconstructed from presentation materials).

As referenced above, the performative instrument in Max/MSP, designed from studio-assembled stabilised materials, produces the simultaneous reading of multiple layers and spatial distribution across six channels. This architecture ensures the performer plays a role similar to that of an action director, capable of articulating trajectories of density and involvement in response to the text, without converting the performance into either rigid execution or arbitrary improvisation. Thus, the instrument and six-channel spatialisation do more than generate performance flexibility: they distribute agency away from the visibly speaking body, allowing spatial movement itself to assume the role of an autonomous scenic element: a form of movement that does not depend on the onstage body.

The scenography adopts a deliberate economy of means, incorporating a small number of multifunctional props as functional objects. This choice recalls post-dramatic theatre (Lehmann Reference Lehmann2006), where the scene does not represent a world so much as compose conditions of perception and relation. Projection is confined to active scenic surfaces (bench and music stands), avoiding a separate screen and maintaining the stage as a site of transformation, particularly through mapped tapestry textures (Figure 6). Rather than constructing an illustrative environment, these components define a topology of reading, circulation and transformation. Analytically, what matters is that staging reorganises perception through a minimum of means, making mediation perceptible without turning technology into spectacle.

Figure 6.

General view of the performance: electronics performer on the left and actress at the music stand; mapped projection on the bench and music stands (textures derived from the tapestries). Photograph: still taken from the author’s video recording.

A central feature of the staging is the ‘light tent’, conceived as a luminous focus that delimits a threshold. This piece, inspired by ‘À mon seul désir’, does not represent a tent; it rather activates a spatial situation. Given its location in the central axis of the room and not exclusively on the stage, the tent shifts the reference to the spectator’s space in proposing that the symbolic ‘interior’ may coincide with an interior of listening. In the performance, this focus functions as a threshold operator (entrance/exit and key moments), punctually concentrating the relationship between actress and performer without ever imposing itself as a representational sign (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

Actress in the “light tent” next to the electronics performer; activation of the light focus at the beginning and end of the performance. Photograph: still taken from the author’s video recording.

Lighting and projection adopt the principle of technological discretion. Images remain attached to the objects and surfaces already active in the scene, avoiding a stand-alone screen that would impose itself as a dominant device. This prevents the work from becoming demonstratively audiovisual even if it also means accepting that mediation may sometimes go unnoticed so that the poem and the sound remain foregrounded.

In summary, the staging is organised as a practice of expressive minimums and the careful distribution of agencies. By rejecting direct allegorical equivalences and treating light, space and sound spatialisation as compositional operators, this scenic device enables words to remain action and music to act as a second text, preparing the transition to the situated listening regime that would then be developed in the installation.

7. The installation: Situated listening and regimes of attention

In A Dama e o Unicórnio, the installation constitutes a distinct mode of existence alongside the editorial object and the performance. The installation and performance shared the same space – the Winter Garden of the São Luiz Theatre – but at different times: the installation during bar opening hours and the performance at night. This alternation became constitutive of the actual dispositif, combining technical sharing with clear demarcation. As a hybrid space of circulation, sociability and brief stays, the Winter Garden required a non-invasive approach: the installation had to coexist with the bar’s everyday use without demanding exclusive attention or imposing a route while also preserving the stage as the venue for the night-time performance.

From a formal point of view, the installation does not propose either any narrative sequence or linear listening. It applies a selection of sounds and poems, played on a loop and combined in a non-sequential manner, approaching the principle of musique d’ameublement: a low-intensity sound presence that transforms the environment without demanding frontality. The analogy with the tapestry is functional: like a tapestry, the installation acts as a field – an active backdrop whose richness is revealed through approximation and variable permanence.

A factor common to both the installation and the performance is the ‘light tent’, positioned on the room’s central axis. In the installation, this acts as an activation threshold within the everyday flow: crossing it triggers a shift from ‘rumour’ (Mariétan Reference Mariétan2005), in which voices and sound materials remain diffuse, to ‘emergence’, in which one voice comes into the foreground and becomes intelligible while the music recedes. Technically, this is managed by an autonomous system coordinating sound diffusion and projection through communication between applications. Presence in the tented area modulates the voices and activates life-sized projected figures, such as the Lady and the Lion (Figure 8). Such interactivity remains deliberately restrained: the device reacts to presence rather than gesture.

Figure 8.

Installation tests: two presences in the “light tent” and projections on the wall (motif: The Lady and the Lion). Photograph by the author.

This option brings into focus a core compositional principle: intermediality does not depend on the continuous simultaneity of media but rather on thresholds. In the installation, the shift from sonic rumour to audible emergence reconfigures the space without turning it into a spectacle, producing a listening experience based on proximity – compatible with the sociability of the bar; this passage from background presence to perceptual emergence is understandable as the organisation of sonic states and transitions (Mariétan Reference Mariétan2005). Ambient noise, audience density and variable attention reflect the constitutive parameters of in situ listening, not anomalies for correction.

In this sense, the installation adopts a lo-fi listening regime in Schafer’s (Reference Schafer1977) sense: a soundscape in which signals are masked by a dense population of simultaneous sounds, reducing distance, separation and perspectival clarity. In the Winter Garden, this is not a defect to be corrected but instead the condition through which the work composes intermittent attention, approach and emergence. This fragmented listening also recalls Nancy’s (Reference Nancy2002) conception of listening as exposure to alterity and contingency. In A Dama e o Unicórnio, the lo-fi condition is therefore not only technical but also aesthetic and thematic: it resonates with the dispersed field of the mille-fleurs and with Horta’s poetics of desire as something emerging through fragments, intervals and partial disclosures rather than continuous narrative. In this respect, the project also closely recalls Mariétan’s (Reference Mariétan2005) understanding of composition as the organisation of sound states and thresholds as well as Minard’s (Reference Minard1996) view of sound installation as the construction of real spatial experience.

The installation works with the Winter Garden’s social and acoustic conditions – circulation, conversation, variable proximity and intermittent attention – as its compositional parameters. This lo-fi listening condition extends beyond the mere technical to also become thematic: it resonates with the politics of desire and voice articulated in the poetry. Intermittent audibility, distraction and partial access generate the means of displacing control, aligning listening with exposure rather than mastery. Hence, the project’s expansion appears not as a multimedia addition but as an intermedial ecology of attention, verging on Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ in which the work is constituted through a shared situation (Bourriaud Reference Bourriaud2009). From this perspective, the installation radicalises the project’s threshold logic by making distraction, circulation and partial listening constitutive of form.

8. Critical discussion: Threshold intermediality, operative mediation and the politics of intelligibility

Analysis of the different instantiations of A Dama e o Unicórnio identifies how intermediality should be thought of less as the continuous co-presence of media and more as a composition of thresholds regulating attention, presence and intelligibility. This perspective borders on those approaches that conceive intermediality as ‘transformation’ (Rajewsky Reference Rajewsky2005), specifically in the sense of medial transposition in which the focus shifts from the respective media to the processes of transition between sensory and cognitive regimes. In the performance, the alternation between zones of clarity and sound friction, between focused light and penumbra and between frontality and the spatial involvement of sound, constructs a dramaturgy of states. In the installation, the transition from ‘noise’ to ‘emergence’ reconfigures everyday space without turning it into a spectacle, producing listening by approximation compatible with the sociability ongoing in the bar.

Mitigating this ambiguity receives support from shifting the thinking of the work from sequence to topology: this is not only composed in time but also in the position and trajectory of the viewer – in an ecology of attention in which the work organises conditions of activation rather than imposing permanent co-presences.

The staging of mediation emerges as a second critical axis. The spatial separation between the actress (on stage) and the electronic performer (in the audience) prevents simplistic allegorical readings and reinscribes electronics as an operative instance: a technical agency that directs, accompanies and reconfigures without putting itself forward as a character. This choice reflects concern over the visibility of technical mediation that has also been explored in other contexts of restaging theatrical works (Sousa Dias Reference Sousa Dias2023), confirming a continued interest in the devices that make mediation processes audible and visible. This choice renders mediation audible and visible and without spectacularising it even while conveying a productive ambiguity: by partially concealing the technical agency, the work may be read as ‘atmospheric’ rather than compositional. Mitigating this ambiguity depends on perceptual markers (spectral emergences, changes in texture, silences, light transitions) and appropriate documentation (programmes, notes, records).

The third axis arises from the politics of intelligibility. Deploying music as a ‘second text’ means accepting the intelligibility of the poem reflects a relational parameter. Behaviours of framing (opening up space for expression) and tension (creating friction and opacity) alternate with symmetrical risks: either losing listeners less familiar with electroacoustic listening should the opacity be intense or slipping into a decorative function should the friction be attenuated. This management reflects a materialist conception of sound, resembling the ‘sound metaphysics’ proposed by Cox (Reference Cox2018), for whom sound primarily accounts for a physical and procedural ‘flow’ (flux), rather than a sign or an illustration. In this perspective, listening becomes a negotiation between clarity and opacity. In the context of Maria Teresa Horta’s poetry, where the voice affirms desire and the body as places of resistance, this management becomes political: negotiating between the right of the word to be understood and the right of music to sustain matter and conflict.

The ‘light tent’ provides the operational means to cut across these axes: a spatial feature that articulates installation and performance without requiring any physical transformation of the site. As a threshold and structural marker (entrance/exit; activation), the tent exemplifies a fertile avenue for thinking about intermedia relations: not through equivalences of content (‘image corresponds to sound’) but through spatial and temporal operators that traverse different regimes of reception.

Finally, it is important to recognise that in situ and lo-fi listening – dependent on ambient noise, audience density and light variations – are not technical deficits but rather a compositional concern. In such conditions, the composer verges on the role of the aménageur: the composer thus organises states and thresholds while assuming the listener’s freedom (and distraction) as inherent to the work. Hence, project coherence lies less in the mandatory simultaneity of the media and more in the consistency of a field of forces (densities, transitions, distributions of agency) capable of reconfiguring listening and, correspondingly, the status of the poem.

9. Final considerations

A Dama e o Unicórnio proposes an intermediality constructed less from overlapping media and more from the conditions for composing. As in post-dramatic theatre (Lehmann Reference Lehmann2006), the work does not ‘represent’ a universe but rather ‘arranges’ a field of forces – densities, thresholds and transitions – that reconfigures both listening and presence, inviting the viewer to inhabit the intervals between these media. Following the work across its three instantiations – editorial object, performance and installation – clearly renders how coherence does not depend on continuous simultaneity between text, sound and image but on transversal operators: music as a ‘second text’ (capable of sustaining continuity and creating friction when necessary), staging as a compositional device (distribution of agencies, visibilities and hierarchies of attention) and the organisation of space by thresholds (in particular the light tent, which articulates regimes of presence without imposing allegorical equivalences).

The transition to the social space of the bar demonstrates how intermediality is also an issue for listening regimes. The installation, assumed as musique d’ameublement in a lo-fi context, transforms the question of intelligibility and attention into an ecology of circulation and brief permanence, bringing the composer closer to the figure of the aménageur: one who composes states and transitions (rumour/emergence), assuming the listener’s freedom – and distraction – as part of the work.

Ultimately, the project enables us to think beyond the dialogue between poetry and electroacoustic composition and outside of the two usual impasses – illustrative redundancy and destructive competition. Between the two, an operational field opens up where the spoken word remains action and sound remains matter but also where each medium can, at different moments, take centre stage, recede or become ambient. The derivations – including the autonomous electroacoustic work A Dama e o Unicórnio – Paisagem (2018) (Sousa Dias Reference Sousa Dias2021) – portray how what persists is not the obligatory co-presence of the media but actually the consistency of a field of forces (densities, thresholds and transitions) capable of reconfiguring listening and, through this, the very status of the poem. This transposability confirms how the project functions less as a closed work and more as a field of experimentation with its coherence maintained even when one of the dimensions (the word) is removed, as had already been anticipated during the first experiments in 2009 (Horta and Sousa Dias Reference Horta and Sousa Dias2009).