Crystal Beings: From Residue To Ritual

'Crystal Beings: From Residue to Ritual' is a workshop centered on the character 'Crystal Beings’ that combines collective making, performance, material transformation and reflection.

Led by multidisciplinary Portuguese artist Luísa Mota, in collaboration with British designer Selom K. Amoa, the project explores how anonymity, collaboration and shared acts of making can temporarily alter the ways in which individuals relate to one another, to their environment and to established social or professional roles. It temporarily reorganizes the relationship between bodies, materials, roles and space.

Collaboration beyond roles and hierarchy

Participants of all ages and backgrounds are invited to collaborate and create a Crystal Being suit through sustainable design principles, where materials from previous workshops are dismantled, washed, reorganized, reused, repurposed or retained for subsequente processes.

Waste is not only reused but rethought — transformed into something modular, durable, and meaningful. The project dissolves boundaries between plasticity, craft and contemporary art, grounding material experimentation in urgent ecological and social realities.

Although the manual provides a common structure, it is intentionally open enough to allow interpretation, adaptation and negotiation between participants. Decisions regarding assembly, proportion, problem-solving and aesthetics emerge collectively, making collaboration an integral part of the making process rather than an external objective.

Anonymity and behaviour

The transition from making an object to inhabiting it is central to the workshop methodology: the suit is not treated simply as a costume, but as a device through which individual identity could be temporarily suspended and other forms of behavior, interaction and collective presence can emerge. 

Participants experience the suit not simply as a costume but as an extension of their body, requiring new forms of movement, spatial awareness and non-verbal communication. The performance is intentionally unscripted. Rather than performing predefined roles, participants respond intuitively to one another, to the architecture and to encounters with people occupying the same environment.

An ever evolving project and methodology

Beyond delivering a predefined workshop, From Residue to Ritual is an evolving project that perfects its methodology with each iteration. As different contexts are explored — such as educational, corporate and cultural —, different concepts and new research fields arise, like collective intelligence and authorship.

With each workshop, the project can explore different aspects going from how anonymity changes behavior and social norms like hierarchy, to how an artistic process can create alternative forms of contact between individuals who ordinarily coexiste through repetitive and professionally defined routines.

Workshops