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For Cai Guo-Qiang, the sky has never been empty. It is paper, theatre, battlefield, dream surface, and temporary archive. A place where images can appear with impossible force, then vanish before they become stable.
With One Page, the Chinese artist brought that logic to Portugal for the first time, staging a monumental one-night performance over the Douro River in Porto on June 27, 2026. Presented as part of BABELL, the work transformed the skies above Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia into a vast composition of light, smoke, fire, and moving image.
The title is beautifully simple. One Page suggests a blank sheet, a beginning, a story waiting to be written. But Cai’s page was not made from paper. It was made from darkness, river air, historic architecture, and the collective attention of crowds gathered along Ribeira and Cais de Gaia. For around ten minutes, the city became both stage and manuscript.
Using 600 drones, coloured smoke, and gunpowder, the performance sketched images inspired by Porto’s literary history, architecture, and cultural identity. The Douro, the skyline, and the old waterfront did not simply frame the work. They became part of it, grounding the spectacle in a city shaped by books, trade, water, memory, and myth.
Cai has spent decades working at the edge between destruction and creation. His gunpowder drawings and pyrotechnic performances carry the thrill of something dangerous being briefly controlled, or perhaps never fully controlled at all. Fire is never just effect in his work. It is material, collaborator, accident, and cosmic punctuation.
What made One Page feel especially contemporary was the entrance of drone choreography into Cai’s visual language. The drones brought precision, pattern, and digital coordination, while the smoke and gunpowder kept the work unstable, bodily, and elemental. Technology did not replace fire. It moved with it.
Commissioned by Fundação Livraria Lello and co-produced with Porto City Council, the project also involved Macedos Pirotecnia and Groupe F. Described as one of Europe’s largest drone performances, One Page turned public space into something shared and fragile: a luminous story written above a city, visible to thousands, owned by no one.
