Discover your impact on water with this interactive video artwork
November 2025, interview
Every two months, Vertical Video presents a new video work in Amare’s public space. In November and December, the featured piece is Moving Matter. We asked the artist, Leon Lapa Pereira, five questions to find out more about the piece.
In September and October your video artwork will be on display Amare. Can you tell us more about its meaning?
"The artwork Moving Matter originates from research into the Rights of Water, environmental consciousness, and collective care. It explores the intimate relationship between the human body—composed of about 60% water—and water itself. Through interactive projection, the work invites audiences to sense this interconnection physically and emotionally.
The digital system behind the work is based on the Niagara particle system, whose countless interacting points form a living, fluid network—a metaphor for community work and collaboration. Moving Matter transforms the abstract urgency of water rights into a shared, embodied experience: Participation and collaboration are the first steps to some wave movements."
Is there a connection between Amare and your artwork?
"Absolutely. The name “Amare” can also be read as “at the sea,” evoking Den Haag’s coastal identity and the fluidity between its cultural institutions: the NDT, Residentie Orkest, and the Conservatoire. Moving Matter resonates with this sense of flow and connection: between water and body and between individual movement and collective transformation. Amare’s Vertical Video platform, located in a public passage, mirrors the artwork’s intention: to bring ecological awareness into daily life and transform passive observation into active engagement."
Can you tell us more about the creation process?
"The work was developed during a residency at Cloud DansLab in Den Haag, in collaboration with Josse Vessies and Isabelle Chaffaud, and began with physical research in swimming pools. These sessions explored how the body moves within and against water, creating muscle memory for the choreography of fluidity. Using TouchDesigner, Unreal Engine, and the Niagara particle system, we developed a dynamic simulation of water responding in real time to human movement. This system became both a visual and conceptual core: its ever-shifting particles reflecting the interdependence and collective momentum essential to ecological and social renewal. The process merges performance, technology, and activism, shifting empathy from the performer toward the element of water itself."
What else do you do as an artist and where does your inspiration come from?
"My practice connects ecological activism with (embodied) performance. Over the past years, I’ve worked closely with the Embassy of the North Sea, researching how artistic practices can represent the voice and rights of water. I’m inspired by the Rights of Nature movement and by the question: how can art evoke empathy that leads to responsibility? My works often seek to blur the boundaries between the poetic and the political, inviting audiences to feel environmental issues through presence and motion rather than abstraction.
Thanks to the collaboration with Josse Vessies, the digital component developed into such a powerful interactive installation. He is a programmer, performer and theatre maker who was a strong inspiration to this work."
What do you hope passers-by and visitors take away from your video artwork?
"We hope visitors become aware of their own presence and influence in space through the interactive projection. As their movements ripple across the digital water surface, they experience how their actions shape and disturb their surroundings. This moment of reflection and play—realising that even small gestures create waves—acts as both metaphor and invitation: to approach water, and the world, with renewed sensitivity and care. Ideally, they walk away recognising that they, too, are part of a larger flow."
Discover more about Leon and about Vertical Video.
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