To pause in the lock at Barragem de Carrapatelo is to be held in a state of suspension. The water rises; stone surfaces shift downward relative to the body with an insistent, mechanical weight. Moving and static. Forced to examine your navigational pause. It moves away from the traditional, horizontal narrative of the river, the movement of commerce and destination, and looks instead at the friction of transition and containment. Much like the exploration of fractured identity in "When the Gusts Came Around," where one moves as a ghost through a former home, here you move through a new city as an outsider navigating its rigid arteries. The mineral stains, the abrasions, and the marks of repeated contact offer a record of use rather than intention.

There is an unease in this ascent. It is a recalibration that hasn’t quite settled, a mapping of a place that wasn't made for you. In Ireland, you look for pieces of yourself in the cracks of a landscape you once knew; in Porto, you find yourself held within structures that offer no such familiarity. You accumulate surfaces and scars, new and repeated frictions. Through this work, I aim to locate myself within a geography in which movement and existence are conditional. The rise continues, not towards an arrival, but as a shift in level, a slight, uncomfortable adjustment in how the body relates it boundaries, forever caught between the desire to settle and the reality of the drift.