The event that will take place until Sunday in the historic center of this city in the district of Aveiro and the Metropolitan Area of Porto invited for this purpose the Dutch artist Gijs van Bon, who will have his typewriter up and running on Saturday afternoon at the Municipal Library, and the Spanish company Holoqué, which on Friday and Saturday will place the pinball machines at the Casa do Moinho.

In the first case, the performance is entitled "Skryf / Escriba" and, after its debut in Utrecht in 2010, it has already been presented 350 times in about 20 countries, using a small mobile robot that, at different degrees of speed, leaves various writings in sand on the ground, whether they constitute a single word or a longer text.

Revealing the words only as it moves to new groups of letters, the robot creates "raw and transient" sentences whose implicit message, according to the author of the concept, is that "everything is transient".

"From an almost irrelevant pile of sand, the machine creates the magic of the word and then it is human beings, nature and the passage of time that are responsible for disintegrating it again," explained Gijs van Bon to the Lusa agency.

The Holoqué company, in turn, is betting on an installation that uses the aesthetic current and the literary genre of Steampunk science fiction -- with its romanticism that is both period and futuristic, by relating the 19th century culture with the appreciation for machines and inventions -- and combines them with pinball games, in which the gestures of the wrist propel balls to certain positions on a surface with obstacles.

In "Steampinballs", participants will thus equip themselves with a virtual reality helmet not only to play pinball, but also to live a holographic experience that, according to Spanish producer Núria Prunera, combines "performing arts, craftsmanship and immersive technology".

Since its debut last year at the FiraTàrrega festival in Catalonia, the installation has only passed through Belgium and now arrives in Portugal to reveal the playful potential of the interaction between "the skills of the classic game and mixed virtual reality".

Núria Prunera reveals how the company's artistic director, Diego Caicedo, conceived the project based on different elements of everyday life: "He decontextualized them from their original functions and transformed them into a parallel world, in which, on the one hand, there is a treasure chest, an old wall clock, a guitar, the Mona Lisa painting and, on the other hand, the seal that distinguishes the Holoqué company, which are the holograms".

The goal is to use technology to connect the audience to an imaginary world, in the awareness that there is a reality "before and after the pandemic" of covid-19.

The 23rd edition of Imaginarius -- International Street Theater Festival of Santa Maria da Feira will present 41 shows between this Thursday and Sunday, thanks to a budget of half a million euros invested in evoking Freedom.

With 15 stages distributed in conventional halls, squares, gardens and other public spaces in the city, the event will host 41 companies of 12 nationalities, representing 190 artists, in a total of 144 exhibitions and 130 hours of content.

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