In his solo exhibition at Arte Fórum Braga, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha presents a new immersive installation for the video Plague Vector. Inside a closed room, he recreates an artificial crystal jungle using coloured lights, smoke, mirrors and sound. The main gallery hosts a multichannel video installation with electronic screens and projections.

Plague Vector, part of an ongoing cinematic project begun in 2015, shows a solitary parachutist caught in the branches of an alien technicolour jungle. His radio alternates between hypnotic static and recordings of his own voice describing a collapsing, toxic landscape. Suspended in a military net entangled in the wild, he drifts through shifting states of consciousness, responding to each new radio soliloquy with the same word: “echo…”.

Referencing feedback loops and hybrid natural/artificial systems, the work evokes the myth of Narcissus and draws inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World, where a strange force crystallises the living world into a state outside time. Here too, the parachutist is trapped in a loop created by the tension between human and natural forces. The piece becomes a metaphor for the antagonism between humanity and nature, and for the technologies that have contributed to environmental degradation and the current climate emergency.