Creativity at the Edge of Silence

A month inside the AstroVan, in the volcanic quiet of Sete Cidades.

By Awaken Azores | Sete Cidades - 24.11.2025

Pictures by Awaken Azores and Carmen Abdallah

In the crater of Sete Cidades, time doesn’t pass — it settles. Days drift with the weather, silence folds around you like a second skin, and the landscape becomes less a place than a presence. This is the atmosphere that greeted Carmen Abdallah — born in Alexandria, Egypt, now based in Canada — the first artist to inhabit the AstroVan: a ceramicist, writer, wanderer, and, in her own words, a “creative human” rebuilding herself after losing everything when her studio burned to the ground.

She arrived alone, carrying only the essential: a bicycle, a project stitched from poetry and lived encounters, and a quiet hunger for stillness. What she found was something she calls “a life-changing time capsule.”

“1 month, 1 small village, 1 van, 1 crater human,” she wrote. “Alone, immersed in excessive beauty, stillness in time and nature's powerful elements, life slows down and one is able to observe, absorb and feel life unfold… This is when creativity surfaces,” she added. And then, almost as if concluding a confession: “I carry this once in a lifetime experience like a life-changing time capsule in my heart that shifted my mindset forever.”

The AstroVan — “an iconic presence with its travelling history” — became her shelter. Not as a retreat from the world, but as an invitation to stand closer to it.

The rooftop deck turned into her morning observatory.
The fire pit became a small ritual of warmth and grounding.
The outdoor studio, kitchen, and bathroom stretched her days into the open air.
The indoor atelier offered a companion for deep work when the fog curled in.

“I was literally outside most of the time,” she wrote.
“The van, perfectly thought-of with all its comfy details, became my home, my original safe space.”

During her residency, Carmen gathered fragments of her journeys — stories of strangers, landscapes, small gestures, and the quiet heroism of ordinary life — and began shaping them into illustrated narratives, the early architecture of a graphic novel born from wandering and loss. In Sete Cidades, these stories found oxygen. They expanded.

Here, creation happens not because the artist isolates, but because the island insists on presence. “The support and availability of Fred and Veronika was generous yet discreet and respectful, which allowed me to feel trustful and independent at the same time,” Carmen highlighted. The crater asks you to pay attention. The weather erases your plans. The cows cross the road when they want. And somewhere between rain showers and lake reflections, artists remember something essential: that slowness is not emptiness — it’s clarity.

“Through this experience,” Carmen wrote, “I was able to be creative, connect with people, be humbled by nature and discover a whole lot about myself.” And then she offered what may be the truest measure of any residency: “It has been by far the most fulfilling experience of my life so far, which will continue to feed my creativity throughout my life.”

She left carrying not just new work, but a recalibrated way of seeing.

The AstroVan Artist Residency was created for these moments — the ones that shift something quiet and irrevocable inside. Each resident steps into the same landscape, but no one leaves with the same story.

• See more about Carmen’s experience in the gallery below.