Felippe Moraes
Madeira quando morre canta (Wood Sings When It Dies), 2025, from the Samba Exaltação series
Grand piano, flashing neon, dead cicada and glass dome
Variable dimensions
Madeira quando morre canta (Wood Sings When It Dies, 2025), by Felippe Moraes, is an installation that brings together sound, matter and language to investigate the relationship between music, death and transformation. Inside the tail of a grand piano, a flashing neon continuously alternates between the words “MADEIRA QUANDO MORRE” and “CANTA.” Resting on the instrument is a dead cicada protected under a glass dome, creating a silent field of symbolic resonance between the musical object and the small body of the insect.
The work makes direct reference to the song Minha Missão (1981), composed by João Nogueira and Paulo César Pinheiro. “The cicada dies when it sings / And the wood sings when it dies.” The line establishes a poetic inversion between two sonic fates: that of the cicada, which finds in music the final instant of its existence, and that of wood, which after dying becomes an instrument capable of producing music.
In the piano used in the installation, wood — once-living matter — becomes a resonant body. The tensioned strings vibrate and propagate sound within a structure built from a tree that was cut down and transformed into a musical instrument. Thus, the death of the wood is converted into the possibility of music.
Felippe Moraes explores this material paradox. The wood ceases to grow and to exist as an organism, but comes to take part in a new cycle of symbolic life through sound. The piano thus becomes a kind of acoustic body that continues to sing even after the death of the matter that gave rise to it.
In this sense, the work proposes a reflection on transformation and continuity. Death does not appear merely as an ending, but as a passage between different forms of existence and expression.