Quietude in Performance: Audiovisual Performativity and Natural-Cultural Heritage in the Littoral Geopark of Viana do Castelo

This article examines how audiovisual performativity can mediate natural and cultural heritage and ecological awareness in the Viana do Castelo Littoral Aspiring UNESCO Global Geopark, in Portugal. The research adopts an art-based and phenomenological framework to investigate how stillness, duration, and digital mediation act as aesthetic and ethical strategies for reconfiguring the relationships between body, landscape, and technology. Centred on the concept of quietude, understood not as absence but as a generative suspension that heightens perception, the project maps affective characteristics of the geopark (calm, introspection, conciliation, and equanimity) and translates them into audiovisual and performative movements. The performer, operating simultaneously as narrator and media operator, constructs real-time sound and image compositions that merge environmental field recordings with live manipulation. This process transforms the performance site into a liminal space where memory, imagination, and geography converge. The findings reveal that quietude functions as a performative method of ecological attunement, fostering attentiveness, reflection, and emotional connection to place. Through its integration of digital tools and sensory phenomenology, quietude repositions technology as an agent of intimacy rather than separation. The work contributes to the discourse on Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) by demonstrating how embodied artistic practices can support environmental sustainability.