THE TRANSIENCE OF THINGS - Antonio Celso Ribeiro - 2026

The Transience of Things unfolds as a meditation on impermanence through the convergence of image, gesture, and sound. The video resists narrative in favor of close observation: the aging body is revealed in fragments—eyes, beard, hands—each carrying its own temporality. The repeated gesture of touch becomes a form of self-recognition, as if the performer were tracing the evidence of time upon himself. The final image—hands at rest, holding a pair of glasses—marks a suspension between perception and withdrawal. It is neither conclusion nor resolution, but a threshold: a moment in which seeing, remembering, and accepting converge. The musical landscape extends this introspection outward. Drawing on sonorities that evoke the open steppes and the shifting sea, the composition situates the individual within vast, impersonal cycles. The melancholic voice of the morin khuur functions as both witness and elegy, bridging the intimate and the elemental. The subtitle, “the rivers of autumn weep for my mistakes,” introduces a dimension of retrospection and quiet remorse. Here, transience is not only the fading of the body, but the persistence of memory—of choices carried forward like currents that cannot be reversed. In this work, time is not depicted as a linear progression but as an accumulation of traces: in the body, in the landscape, and in sound. What remains is not permanence, but resonane. The video isn’t just a portrait of aging—it’s a quiet negotiation with time itself. The camera’s insistence on fragments (eyes, beard, hands) resists the idea of a unified, stable identity. Instead, it shows a body already in passage: hair turned white, gestures slowed into ritual, touch becoming a form of memory. The act of caressing the beard and hair feels less like vanity and more like verification—am I still here, or already becoming something else? The ending is especially telling. Hands resting on the thighs, holding the glasses: a pause between seeing and not seeing. Glasses are an instrument of clarity, but here they are inactive—vision suspended. It suggests acceptance, or perhaps a moment before recognition. The body settles, but the question of time remains unresolved. The music you describe deepens this reading. The evocation of the steppes opens a vast, horizontal sense of time—ancient, indifferent, stretching beyond the individual. The sea introduces another dimension: cyclical motion, recurrence, and erosion. Both landscapes dwarf the human figure, placing personal aging within a larger, almost geological temporality. The morin khuur, with its raw, vocal timbre, often carries a sense of lament that feels both intimate and ancestral—as if the instrument itself remembers. “The rivers of autumn weep for my mistakes” reframes transience as something ethical, not just physical. Autumn is not merely decline—it is the season of reckoning. Rivers, unlike the static images of the body, are always moving; their “weeping” suggests that time does not forget, even if we try to. The Transience of Things Music by Antonio Celso Ribeiro Morin Khuur by Han Qiao (to whom the piece is written for and dedicated to) Video conception: António Olaio Voice: Janete Junqueira Singer: Carô Rennó This composition is part of my Post doctoral studies at Colégio das Artes - University of Coimbra, Portugal - 2026