Artists in Residence
Artists from the Residency Program and the Mentorship program
Maria José Ramos
Tem explorado trabalhos com características geométricas, realizados com recurso a prensa de gravura. Monotipias sobre papel com tintas de gravura, utilizando máscaras (acetato, cartão, tecido, ...) que produzem não múltiplos, mas peças únicas, explorando o erro e o acaso.
Paula Gibert Roset
Bringing together drawing, installation, photography, video and sound, together they explore the interest in tracing affective moments from the past that often leave no trace and, when they do, are almost imperceptible. The aim is to investigate and explore the spaces where water creates the meeting point in the community and to extract from the walls, the floor and the objects found the stories they contain. Calvino's story about the city of Zaira serves as a premise for imagining, talking about and fabricating affective moments spent both around fountains and in public washhouses.
Beatriz Pereira
The joint project “The Future is Dry”, by artists Runa Marie Dubrow and Beatriz Pereira, is based on a short film shot in 2022 in an empty swimming pool. It addresses the alarming prediction that, by 2050, a third of the world's population will face extreme water shortages - a reality that many people are already experiencing. a reality that many people are already experiencing. “The Future is Dry” is a visual dance installation project that aims to raise awareness of water scarcity and environmental issues. scarcity and environmental issues. Using video, sound, light and expressive movements, the project presents a profound theme without any embellishments.
Runa Marie Dubrow
The joint project “The Future is Dry”, by artists Runa Marie Dubrow and Beatriz Pereira, is based on a short film shot in 2022 in an empty swimming pool. It addresses the alarming prediction that, by 2050, a third of the world's population will face extreme water shortages - a reality that many people are already experiencing. a reality that many people are already experiencing. “The Future is Dry” is a visual dance installation project that aims to raise awareness of water scarcity and environmental issues. scarcity and environmental issues. Using video, sound, light and expressive movements, the project presents a profound theme without any embellishments.
Senhor Vulcão
One-man music and handmade songs. Folkrap intervention. Senhor Vulcão is a Portuguese singer-songwriter in love with his mother tongue, where he finds inspiration in words and expressions from our vast lexicon, less used or in extinction. Inspired by traditional Portuguese roots, he creates simple songs with humor, love, sarcasm, diving and revolution. A kind of erupting folk-rocker, carried away by the waves of the sea and the raw nature he falls in love with. All his albums are author's editions, numbered and limited.
Elisabete Gonçalves
Projeto entre pintura, desenho, escultura e instalação. Objetos e organismos encontrados, quebrados ou em transição. Ensaio, reparar, recontextualizar, construir, fragmentos do corpo, ritual, prender, marcar, simbolismo, descobrir, riscar, energia, morte, procura, lugar.
Melody Hesaraky
I translate my notion beauty to visual arts, textile design and wearables. In a world obsessed with speed my artistic language came to life organically, day by day with patience, practice and love towards humanity, I have become recognized as an artist & designer who is building a bridge between the worlds of art, fashion and music! I strive to create magic and atmosphere through my visual storytelling! My artistic language doesn’t belong to a specific group of people! As a creator who has lived and studied around the world, my work is a bridge between gaps and my vision smooths out the sharp lines, borders and boxes.
Fredrik Robens
While I live the journey and the landscape, the whole comes together from fragments. Immersing myself in mundane excerpts... How can I squeeze an artistic creation from the fruit born of the encounter? How are stories read, especially those that have not been written? A place in consonance with all the places visited and revisited in memory. Discovering silenced stories. Non-We in the We-Space? Investigating otherness in the village. The Established and the Outsiders?
Cyril Reichenbach
The subject of water, and more specifically the network of structures around it, has been and continues to be a recurring theme since my formative years. in my work. I started working from an illustration on the same subject on the 100 franc note of the Congo. note. In this Residency, the initial references for the drawing will be points where water originates or other structures that use water flows. near the village of Maceira, in the vicinity of Rama.
Osias André
In the Residency I am interest in experimenting, in painting, drawing and objects, whether found or constructed or constructed, in a relationship with the figurative. I see my work more and more as a kind of decoagulation or a form of awareness of something that is inside me, in the relationship with death, living beings, animals, nature and issues related to violence, recorded in a personal language.
Irina Kaldeway
During my residency at RAMA, I will use a loom to create handwoven fabrics that I will transform into sculptures. My project is inspired by stories from Portuguese friends and a book about how people in ancient times appreciated mountain water for its freshness. In addition, a poem by Mário de Sá-Carneiro influences my work. The poem, written at a well on the south bank of the River Tagus, says: ‘Cold, clear water on a blue night, Water, it should be your love for me...’. The poem speaks of cold, clear water and its metaphorical connection to love, which is bringing a poetic side to my work, related to the weaving process and the traditions that several generations have taught younger generations about nature and water inspire my work.
Patrick Hicks
Ceramics found me, and I am forever grateful for that, so I'm leaned in 1000%. I want to continue to grow and explore my ceramics journey. I believe that an artist residency can help not only technically complete a task but work alongside others to learn perspectives and skills that can influence my work. I want to succumb to what I don't know and live, breathe, and eat my craft through a program that will allow me to.
Rafaela Ferreira
Drawing and painting as an event seek an idea of a rhythmically defined surface, a painting outside formalist schemes and in the direction of an absolute image, perhaps the last possible image in the face of an excess of images. An image that, even so, makes us imagine, summon and reactivate the first gestures of the Human in its attempt to plastically transform its conceptions, emotions and perceptions.
Maria Matias
Ploughing by hand. My artistic practice has focussed on the intention I set when creating objects, and the way I explore the possibilities of how I explore the possibilities of matter to bring ideas to the level of the image. For this project, using experimental techniques, I'd like to reinvent ancient tools for cutting, engraving and hunting. ancestral tools of cutting, engraving and hunting within what is my poetic field of objects; creating a narrative dialogue between the drawing and the object, in the same way that in the there was in the past a relationship between drawings engraved in stone and objects built for that purpose. purpose.
Constança Saturnino
Diving into local soil and plant life to gather inspiration and materials - Creating Shelter & Armour: Using the soil of my homeland (where I haven't lived for 20 years), create extensions of the body - themes of home and protection using earth materials, particularly taipa (cob) - Investigating the properties of local medicinal plants, symbolising resilience and transformation, while navigating my own "plant blidness", juxtaposed with my legibility of the plant world in a country where I wasn't born (UK). Exploring the notions of homeland/non-homeland - Interacting with local artisans and community members through workshops and collaborative projects.
Mariana Martins
I have the luxury of writing poetry every day is an experimental writing project in Portuguese in which the aim is to tear up the words once put into my poems, which I no longer contemplate, but rather disdain. In this act of tearful destruction, a transformation is observed. During the residency I intend to discover and explore different methods of tearing up words and create a publication in which the reader sees the unfolding of a creative process. Among the explorations are, for example, an absurd use of footnotes, dry humour that brings the banal to romantic verbiage, cutting and replacing words, and the reappearance of sentences that have already been read.
Céline Kadara
"The voice of the trees", as part of my RAMA residency, I will explore ways of communicating with the trees around me. I will make paper from used paper and collected tree waste and develop pigments based on collected natural elements. I will "work" with local trees in order to develop a common alphabet that will allow me to establish an ecological dialogue between human beings and their environment.
Ânia Pais
RAMA Grant awarded as part of the Millennium BCP Foundation Young Art Prize 2023. The experience of the landscape is the source of inspiration, the pause in time that opens up in space as we understand it is the event that we want to publicise. The work manifests itself as a situated but open stage on which bodies are staged and choreographed according to the relationship they establish with each other on stage. A performative work that begins in the studio and spreads to the spectator, a sensitive body that inhabits the space, that makes itself known and reveals itself as we walk, like a landscape theatre. The dialogue emerges in the emptiness of the scene, in which a visual and physical communication is built between the event and the spectator through body writing...
Madalena Bettencourt
"No Irritating Background Noise", in the proposed project, having the place where I am as my main influence, I try to explore its sound space. The SoM and its ability to represent a place. I have in mind a series of ideas that I want to realise there, which will consist of a set of physical objects, recordings, drawing, video, photography, performance and installation; based on the exploration of the Bell object as the basis of the work. Through the time spent there, I want to be able to understand in a deeper way how I live with what affects me, in an interrelationship with the soundscape of the village.
Anastasia Solopova
I want to examine the possibility of heroism in the 21st century, and attempt to develop artistic forms to represent the idea of heroism through drawings and other analogue graphic means. The history of visual arts has a huge repertoire of iconografic instruments to depict heroes: countless martyrs in christian art are heroic, just as Jesus himself is a hero; the protagonists of antique myths are heroes, and heroic are also the figures depicted in historicist battle scenes. This visual repertoire of heroism - the fighting and the suffering, the martyrdom - however, does not seem appropriate when we think about heroism today. Is this, because the present does not have room for heroes? Or do we have to understand (and depict) heroes today differently from the sword wielding Achilles or the Santa Lucia with her eyes ripped out?
Meg Neil
I am an expressionist of many forms and love to paint and be in creative community. I love to create abstract, nature-inspired works that encapsulate beautiful and imperfect moments of time. This year, my main project is But A Vessel: On Waking Up. This body of work was birthed by my experience navigating dissociative identity disorder and is a greater statement on holding space for healing and expanding beyond this physical body. As I am traveling, I am currently working on my poetry zine, concepting, and shooting video. My final goal is a visual art exhibition to be shown in October in Portland at Lolo Pass. With interactive features, my hope is for the viewer to feel mirrored and inspired by the works.
Régis Dumoulin
Graduated from a master’s degree in architecture in Brussels, Régis, dancer at heart, is a researcher, writer, visual designer wandering between the creative fields of architecture, photography, art and dance. His personal practice often uses the notion of temporality of time as a discursive and creative concept to re-enchant matters of education, progress and col- lectivity.
Claudia Cuesta
This project will give us an opportunity to together create a new body of work contextual to our observations and experience while being at Rama. In this time of uncertainty, we are drawn to critically explore in collaboration the global current grief- loss that is permeating every aspect of life, and that is not talked about. We are interested in telling the truth about the disillusion we feel about the time we are living in and in finding a language to bridge all the small actions that are taking place in the world to reach a better outcome.
Bill Baker
This project will give us an opportunity to together create a new body of work contextual to our observations and experience while being at Rama. In this time of uncertainty, we are drawn to critically explore in collaboration the global current grief- loss that is permeating every aspect of life, and that is not talked about. We are interested in telling the truth about the disillusion we feel about the time we are living in and in finding a language to bridge all the small actions that are taking place in the world to reach a better outcome.
Sergio Policicchio
In the project "For those who see gold in butterflies" the self overcomes borders and involves all the senses in an open encounter with the world. Natural elements are concentrated in details such as water, dewdrops, leaves, trees, willow branches and evanescent dandelions.
Emilia Pennanen
I will use the RAMA residency as a phase for research and experimentation for my project, in which I explore how water acts both as a force of life and as a force of erosion. These themes are present in the ecology of the territory. For e.g. I want to visit local sites where Cretaceous Mesofossil Flora have been found in Torres Vedras. During the residency I will gather water from different sources in different stages of its cycle, as well as sand and other soil materials in the village, the surrounding nature and on the shores. I will use water and sand in the process of developing photographic imprints. The final outcome will be exhibited in a solo exhibition in Finland in May 2024.
Maria de Bonelli
The Life of Plants Project - Arborescences This is a collective artistic project by three artists, Ana Mantero, Maria João Gromicho and Maria de Bonelli, whose starting point is the theme of the book "The Life of Plants" by Emanuelle Coccia. With the help of RAMA, we are interested in reflecting on this thematic meeting, which aims to articulate the dialogue between individual plastic creations, but interconnected by a common thread. Sharing Coccia's key ideas has proved very enriching for the Arborescências group's artistic endeavours. Our aim is to recreate forms from the plant world, using the arts of textiles, painting, collage, sculpture and the plastic exploration of natural materials.
Jana Kunzler
"... I will delve deeper into the material of paper, a central element of my art. I immerse myself, let myself be inspired by the flora and fauna of the surroundings and carry the impressions and materials I have gained back into my work. To this end, I engage in the art of paper-making, a process of preserving experienced impressions. The basis of new works inspired by the sun-stained hills, winding paths, old cork oaks, climbing vines, fragrant eucalyptus and bamboo swaying gently in the wind."
Ana Mantero
The Life of Plants Project - Arborescences This is a collective artistic project by three artists, Ana Mantero, Maria João Gromicho and Maria de Bonelli, whose starting point is the theme of the book "The Life of Plants" by Emanuelle Coccia. With the help of RAMA, we are interested in reflecting on this thematic meeting, which aims to articulate the dialogue between individual plastic creations, but interconnected by a common thread. Sharing Coccia's key ideas has proved very enriching for the Arborescências group's artistic endeavours. Our aim is to recreate forms from the plant world, using the arts of textiles, painting, collage, sculpture and the plastic exploration of natural materials.
Maria João Gromicho
The Life of Plants Project - Arborescences This is a collective artistic project by three artists, Ana Mantero, Maria João Gromicho and Maria de Bonelli, whose starting point is the theme of the book "The Life of Plants" by Emanuelle Coccia. With the help of RAMA, we are interested in reflecting on this thematic meeting, which aims to articulate the dialogue between individual plastic creations, but interconnected by a common thread. Sharing Coccia's key ideas has proved very enriching for the Arborescências group's artistic endeavours. Our aim is to recreate forms from the plant world, using the arts of textiles, painting, collage, sculpture and the plastic exploration of natural materials.
Ana Sério
"The Spirit of Place: the set of works I intend to do during the residency is part of the research I've been doing since 2016, and now in my PhD in Fine Arts / Painting: The relationship between literary language and pictorial language. Based on the novel "Finisterre - landscape and settlement", I try to represent the various landscapes (physical and psychological) constructed by the writer from the point of view of the narrator at different stages of his life. narrator at different stages of his life (child and adult)."
Helen Butler
"The work is not so much a recording of territory, but a trace of my presence in connection to the environment. My work is feeling based, responding to what touches me in relation to colours, light, landscape, the people I connect with."
Joana Rita
"The work I have been developing, exposes the vulnerability and the distancing of human relationships as a consequence of social networks. (...) The sharing with other artists and with the resident community itself, becomes crucial to this experience, since outside the screens we are human beings who communicate by words, sounds, gestures and looks, we are beings who feel and are transformed by the presence of the other."
Maria Fradinho
"Occupying the landscape evokes the perception of the limits of the various bodies that inhabit it in its maximum extension. Thus, I intend to dwell, through a multidisciplinarity of techniques and materials, on these visible and invisible marks that value the permanent dialogue between space and inner reflection."
Katherine Costa
"Nature has always been an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me, and I seek to explore in my art the intimate connections between human beings and their natural environment, as well as to appeal to attention and sensitivity to the beauty and fragility of life. The artist residency will provide an enabling environment for me to further this investigation and develop projects that can broaden people's perceptions of nature and our role as beings integrated with it."
Diogo Costa
An association between one of the floods of Ludwig Mies Van de Rohe's Farnsworth House, the signs that make up my artistic practice and the characteristics of place of RAMA's artistic residence, motivates the exploration of space and landscape in painting. In the dialogue between architecture and nature, which are assumed as metaphors of rationality and emotion, interiority and exteriority manifest themselves in a tension, affecting each other, where color, brushstroke, visual composition and installation in space seek to form environments that instigate the displacement of the body, gaze and attention of the viewer. In a practice that combines the delay of making and the quality of attention, I try to make painting a potential place endowed with the property of being able to contain and open the perception of the observer to issues related to introspection and self-awareness.
Gabriela Noujaim
Her artwork raises questions about the indigenous’ socio-environmental ancestral heritage, the protection against assault on a woman’s body, stretching constraints of socio-political structures in Brazilian society. Graduated in Printmaking from the School of Fine Arts of UFRJ in 2007, the artist has been structuring her poetics from the interest in the technical image constructed from videos, photographs and, more initially, the engraving, and by the idea to fix an image in time.
Maria Fradinho
In my visual work perpetuates an involvement with daily life and the act of urban areas. In this process of creating from forms, lines and objects found in these places, the memory of the body, the ocasionalities of being a walker and the sensations of the movements originate in my experience a sensibility that is later transposed to two and three-dimensional compositions. In this way, I use a multidisciplinarity of techniques in order to potentiate the procedural references and the matter itself, where an "almost intimate" relationship is proposed between the observer, the work and the space.
Carolina Kasting
"...Seeking poetic relations between materialities of the human corporeal organism and nature, I wonder where this zone of intersectionality is. What tensions arise between the foreign urban body of the artist and the forms, lines, textures and cycles of the local flora and landscape? Body and nature, both actors of the feminine in seasonality and transformation. I will use practices from the studio, such as ceramics and ancestral matriarchal weavings, hammocks, knitting, crochet and other weavings that may emerge from the regional culture where Rama is inserted. Monotype techniques, having as matrix the body and other materials collected from the biome, will also give shape to the poetics emerging from this intersection. Material and immaterial come together and separate from the dialogue that will take place with the biome and the population, with a focus on sustainability and ecology when materials from the environment and local production are used".
Jana Kunzler
"... I will delve deeper into the material of paper, a central element of my art. I immerse myself, let myself be inspired by the flora and fauna of the surroundings and carry the impressions and materials I have gained back into my work. To this end, I engage in the art of paper-making, a process of preserving experienced impressions. The basis of new works inspired by the sun-stained hills, winding paths, old cork oaks, climbing vines, fragrant eucalyptus and bamboo swaying gently in the wind."
Rachel Kahn
"...explore and investigate themes of pattern, repetition and memory through ceramics. Clay is not only a medium, but a collaborator. By allowing chance and change to occur throughout the process, I am left with a piece that feels both mine and of nature, a combined choreography. My process involves coating the clay in layers of cryptic messaging and symbols that oftentimes fade away, or completely disappear by the time the glaze is added. This exploration of objects as "memory relics" has led me to the ancient method of pit firing, as this is the truest collaboration between artist and earth. I hope to experiment with the natural landscape and materials around me at the residency to enshrine Time."
E.S.H.A
We are a multidisciplinary team of artists and athletes focused on researching the human body in motion, and its ability to adapt in the natural environment. Our search has organically formed a connection between different disciplines that are characterized by physical training and artistic expression. The objective use of live music, as well as recording the experiences in an audio visual format, have become fundamental pillars for our method. All these elements give rise to our team, encompassing the investigation of the physical dimension, the capacity for artistic expression and the way of communicating our message.
Susana Paiva
"I am interested in the ontological questions of the image and in the creation of images, without using traditional equipment for photographic capture. My practice is based on the possibility of hybridizing means of creating "cameraless" images with technological devices of production and communication. I am interested in creating in an intense way, enjoying a deceleration of the outside world, which serves my artistic practice so well."
Brittany Newell
"My work is about the body. My objective is three-fold: to create fictional worlds that are immersive, a space for the body to enter into; to write personal essays that do the work of theory, critically reflecting on the queer / otherized body and its experiences; and to make experimental performance, using the body as material. I care about worlds and I care about space, the landscapes both real and imagined in which bodies move. As a writer, performer, dominatrix, and woman, I seek new ways to touch and be touched."
Paulina Dornfeldt
“Nature can be tiny and intricate or vast and breathtaking. In between I am. I am a nomad living alongside nature. It’s the shapes and textures that activate my inspiration and lead to memories that always open a new direction. I extract natural materials such as pigments or charcoal from the places I live, creating my works on site out there in nature. The paintings becoming portraits of the places themselves, an abstract diary and after all a picture of the country itself.”
Tiago Leonardo
"This residence seems the perfect opportunity to continue my research, and for that I would like to take a step back in the technology of image production - dry part of them as Jeff Wall calls it - experimenting the possibilities of exploring their liquid condition - in a double sense - through an overhead projector, in a game of layers, transparencies and opacities - also believing that only the immersiveness of the scale of a projection will do justice to what we intend to explore here, not ceasing to intend to complement this whole project with "physical" elements."
Madalena Lopes e Léo Raphaël
The project we propose to develop in the context of the RAMA artist residency, seeks to explore the intelligibility of things both textually and sensorially. It adopts an approach between fiction and documentary, in the villages of Maceira and Alfeiria. Through on location research and the collection of community testimonies we intend to create a series of objects that interconnect myths, rituals and esoteric knowledge related to finding water. As a starting point we will turn to the dowser and consider mystical phenomena as a creative refuge rather than seeing them as farces. In a movement beyond the visible and tangible, we will try to feel the water.
Sara da Graça Santos
"Observing water, its movements and properties in an intrinsic relationship with time is one of the activities that most enriches me as an artist. I have been developing a silent and solitary work on the banks of the Óbidos lagoon where I observe the gentle movement of the tides that allows me to contemplate the ephemerality of the compositions I make with natural objects, which I dispose and place at the disposal of time and the movements of the natural environment. I don't give them names but I like to look at them as sentinels".
Dana Melamed
I consider myself a nomad artist: Moving from the middle East to the US and traveling extensively I was influenced by history, cultures, their natural habitats and unique methods of processing local materials. My work depicts the power struggle between man and environment. “Nature, engineered” is a series of drawings and weaving of manufactured and natural materials on handmade paper. I use local raw materials - a flower grown in Africa, electrical components, algorithms and genome sequences from the US – all woven into the paper’s natural fibers. My sculptures combine Cholla (cactus carcass from the deserts of New Mexico) and computer components – all reintegrated back in nature and reclaimed by her. ...The RAMA Residency provides a unique opportunity for research on the region’s plant life, history and architecture - and the local culture’s holistic relationship with nature.
Ana Luísa Ribeiro
The project "Art, Ecology and Memory" will have two strands: 1. outdoor work with an installation character, under the theme "Art and Ecology", in the forest(s) surrounding the studio and residence spaces. 2. painting work "inspired" by the local landscape... hiking, walks in the area... although inspired by the landscape of Maceira and surroundings, they relate mainly to my memory(s).
Susana Paiva
"The project "Difícil Poema" has an experimental character and invokes the language of photography and performance.
I am interested in the ontological questions of the image and in the creation of images, without using traditional equipment for photographic capture. My practice is based on the possibility of hybridizing means of creating "cameraless" images with technological devices of production and communication.
I am interested in creating in an intense way, enjoying a deceleration of the outside world, which serves my artistic practice so well."
Phoenix Mccallum
"During the residency I plan to develop a piece in reaction to the anti-abortion laws implemented around the world.
The aim is to honor the courage of people who have decided to undergo abortion and to refute the recurrent stereotype that pregnancy interruption is an "easy solution".
I believe that political art is the most accessible form of communication to address taboo topics. I intend to create a collection of multimedia sculptures with the goal that women can see themselves in this project, feel represented and respected in their autonomous bodily choices.
This collection intends to counteract the deeply rooted taboos related to abortion, it will be a means of opening up the dialogue about menstrual and reproductive rights."
Cláudia Guerreiro
The project Sem Título brings together a series of small format drawings, the result of a process initiated in an artistic residence at The Beekepers, Castro Marim, in June 2021. These drawings reflect a need to change directions, to change processes and renovate motivations, looking for results in new places. ... a struggle against the obsession with control, in a process that begins with scratching instruments (pencil and pen) and quickly finds a possibility in the stain, where water is in charge. Delegating the decisions of form to the material and living peacefully with that, letting instinct and will determine the course of the work.
Maria Fradinho
In my visual work perpetuates an involvement with daily life and the act of urban areas. In this process of creating from forms, lines and objects found in these places, the memory of the body, the ocasionalities of being a walker and the sensations of the movements originate in my experience a sensibility that is later transposed to two and three-dimensional compositions. In this way, I use a multidisciplinarity of techniques in order to potentiate the procedural references and the matter itself, where an "almost intimate" relationship is proposed between the observer, the work and the space.
Leonor Neves
"I am interested, therefore, in exploring the idea of landscape as a complete, sensorial experience, as a thing that involves us and of which we are a part, and not as a field of contemplation (despite the fact that the term refers, in its essence, to a thing to be looked at). Also for this reason, the drawings carry with them a strong haptic and atmospheric sense. I am also interested in the idea of drawing as a continuity."
Rita Borralho Silva
"My artistic practice arises from a poetic approach on language, collective memory, sound and symbol, which is revealed in a series of actions, installations, choreographies and performative readings. I like to describe myself as a poet, visual researcher and performer, and my work is usually based on my body, its memory and the various metaphors that arise from reality".
Haile Binns
Haile Binns, is a Jamaican American Artist born and raised in New York. She creates art from materials in her intermediate environment. Her art process is a philosophy of transformation by assemblage. She is interested in topics that explore racial and economic difference, gender, and African diaspora. She works largely with a combination of natural and found objects. She transforms her findings into sculptures in map like compositions. During this residency Haile will be exploring themes of water, memory, beauty, and light using handmade paper she creates in the studio.
Jemma Rose
"While at the RAMA residency, I would like to continue working on a body of work which developed during my Honours year. The project, titled 'To Know Making', is centred on exploring the materiality and beauty of discarded art media. I am aiming to collaborate with other artists at the residency, discussing and researching how each artist makes their work, and what drives their process. I would like to expand on the idea of the artist as being a part of their work, and how the use of movement and gesture informs their process."
EarthR
EarthR is an artist duo that combines sculpture + painting, ecologies + outsider art, queering art + folk art. We focus on bringing an element of utility to our art practice while having a conversation around usefulness in art. We are attempting to bridge the gap between the long held separation between sculpture and painting. We are looking at the connection between écologie and outsider art while Queering art through folk roots in order to eliminate borders and free up space for new movement.
Anne Beffel
"As Tangible as Waters Running Through Us and as Possible as Sky" My practices of painting and photography are grounded in walking meditation: paying exquisite attention to sensory information as it arises. These embodied practices are balanced with my study of Buddhist influenced art and neuroscience, and Queer Ecology. I explore links between perception and capacities essential to facing climate and social crises... I hope to explore the environmental and cultural factors that birthed Portugal’s current culture of increasingly equal rights for the LGBTQIA+ community.
Carola Ruf
Questions about individually and culturally conditioned perception and communication are at the center of my artistic work. In this context I create drawings, objects, installations as well as photographs with painterly interventions. In the approach of photography and painting, I continue the momentary nature of the place in the painterly fiction. José Saramago's book "The Portuguese Journey" inspired me to make my own "image" of the places visited by the traveler in his narrative. I would like to refer artistically to the locations Dois Portos, Sao Quintino, Arruda , Vila Franca de Xira and Torres Vedras, which are in the immediate vicinity of RAMA and are mentioned in Saramagos report of landscape and culture.
Catarina Gentil
"The house as body, the body as house".
Shelters, tents, huts, flats, houses... where there are people, there is the house. Home is so essential to human existence that we could say they are the extension of each other. That separation between these two concepts does not exist. A house is as much bricks and tiles as it is memories and feelings.
My work develops from inspirations that arise from a careful observation of
observation of daily life at home and materialises in the use of materials and objects inspired or found in that environment, such as crockery, furniture and tablecloths.
Alli Conrad
"My paintings have found a constant and underlining subject of humans with color and identity. I prize color for its powerful symbolism and employ it to communicate emotion and mood. My works manifest through human-like figures that are abstract, linear and colorful, created from imagination, experiences, and long periods of reflection. Through imagination, curiosity, and mystery of the past my works transport through the evolution of cultural trends that portray the past as not fixed and unchanged, but connected to the present moment."
Rita de Sá
"Rita de Sá’s obsessively-worked canvases make us reflect on where we stand with contemporary painting, to the extent where it becomes difficult to decide if these are representative, or more akin to abstract expression. This boils down to one of the work’s fundamental qualities: more than represen- ting something, they seem to be the result of some slowed-down movement, a process where forms are encrusted which, taken to the extreme, could be a metaphor for the actual history of painting itself." Celso Martins
Isabel Dantas dos Reis
"...she has developed personal artistic projects, essentially focused on absence and memory. Isabel spent most of the last decade doing investigative work, through experimentation and personal inner growth. To this end, she took up residence in another country, where she made it a point to fully immerse herself with the local communities. She has recently returned to Portugal, where she continues working on memory: both hers and others’. After a period of living and processing experiences, a need for creative action naturally ensues."
Gwendolyn van der Velden
"It takes two perspectives to make a portrait. One side that sees and registers and the other that sees itself being seen. In a process of projection of identity and expectations, the image that reveals itself seems to have two origins. This process and this moment is very interesting to me. Because of its vulnerability and what it exposes, especially in a moment where we grow increasingly desensitized to what the faces of others say to us. I have been thinking and working on the intersectionality of the woman's situation. In the first season I spent in Maceira, the story of the mothers that founded a school made me want to know more and reach out to the people of the community. In that research I registered the portraits of almost everyone in the village. Now I return to elaborate on that research and transform the images of these people into an exhibition experience that will make us question what does a face say in a time where we are losing the ability to recognise humanity in them, when it seems we only see them if we see ourselves in them."
Tania Urvois
Topics of interest are ecological cycles and networks, notions of succession, symbiosis, entropy, plant intelligence and their applications in bio-mimicry, urban ecology, permaculture, edible gardens, rewilding, fungal and plant based land-remediation; interdisciplinary practices such as technological-transfers and Fab-Lab collaborations; first-culture mythologies and cosmologies such as the Australian Aborigine Dream time; the workings of our inner lives: the subconscious, emotions, memories, sensations and their evolution along with our mental constructs and those eureka! moments of insight. At Rama, I propose to investigate the latter topic through painting and other media.
Conceição Abreu
"With haptic sense, from tactile and kinesthetic stimuli, I investigate spaces of interrelations between body and space, exteriority and interiority, the present and memory. Connections that are generated in the duration of the practice, which is carried out in time which is the present moment, but which is, simultaneously, transitory. Critical of the anthropogenic conduct with which we have been living our relationship with the surrounding environment, my work is aimed at creating new geographies materialized in drawings, objects or moving images. Record or trace that result from the mixture or the "reciprocal penetration" (Emanuele Coccia, 2013) between those dichotomies."
Maria Fradinho
"The sense of body and journey are strongly present in my process: for about a year now the act of regular walking has taken root, which allows me to explore diverse places, landscapes and movements. The action of walking and the topography influence the connection between the Being and the Place, the occasionalities of the walker being and the sharing inherent to the places frequented by those who describe them are part and enrich this experience. Each territory, given its different types (natural or urban) requires specific and diverse attention. This attention contains in itself a discovery and potentiates a look which is very close to the child's look on the world, due to the novelty and availability eminent in walking and in the impressions that are left of it."
Silvana Mammone
Silvana Mammone is a director, writer and vocal artist with a background in comparative literature and contemporary dance. Her current medial focus lies with various models of immersive art and art in public, in which sound and voice play a key role. Her latest project has been an immersive soundwalk in a botanical garden about plant intelligence and communication that close to five hundred people came to experience. She has also studied and practiced various awareness and meditation techniques to include them in her artistic practice and methodology. She is driven by questions revolving around the biological, philosophical and cultural notions and views regarding the mind/body distinction within western culture. She strives to create art that diversely addresses our human longing for connection and often does so by nourishing and mingling artistic and scientific curiosity alike.
Yoav Goldwein
Multi-disciplinary urbanist, anthropologist, and photographer who set on a journey in the last few years to explore alternative ways of living. In my journey I touch many life realms and a wide spectrum of perspective to reach a deeper understanding of life on this planet. My latest thought-provoking exhibition - "Home - Between a Shelter and a Cage", have emerged from the stories of unique characters I met and the wisdom of modern philosophers and is my firstmajor step as an artist and curator.
Venla Helenius
Venla Helenius (she/her 1989) is a visual artist who lives and works in Helsinki and Berlin. Helenius works with video, photography and installation in the context of contemporary art. Her works take the form of audiovisual installation in which she examines humanity as part of wider ecological and cultural continuities. Helenius' works have been presented in the contexts of galleries, museums and performing art venues in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. Her works often have a site sensitive premise, and the narration of the works combines her interest in combining fictional and documentary narrating. At the moment she concentrates on finding ways of metafictional storytelling. She is interested in processes of fiction making and active imagination. Essential questions for her work are: What kind of bodies and forms of being does our imagination bend? What ethical relationships do we form with these fantasies?
Ana Luísa Ribeiro
"… A remarkable feature in Ana Luísa Ribeiro’s method is her work on the way we read and see images, recording the underlining and marginalia readers (or is it herself?) create as a sign of particular interest in a work and its contents.
Even as we are irresistibly drawn towards these paintings by their chromatic harmony and the intellectual fascination, we feel for the pieces they reference, the fact that the painter only depicts fragments (of images and printed or handwritten texts) indicates the playful
distancing she wants to bring into her work. We are never looking at straightforward images, but rather at second- and third-degree readings of them."
João Pinharanda in “Marginalia”, exhibition catalogue, Lisbon 2012
Inês Ferreira-Norman
"What I seek, in this residency, is through a return to drawing, filming, and photographic recording, using "on the ground" interventions that allow me to get my hands on the land and water, and collecting anthropological content, to find a methodology for the elaboration of a long-term work work dedicated to water. This work is always intended to be based on the collection of water and soil and soil samples from the sites I will visit throughout my life, and the methodology is intended to achieve a way to synthesize way to synthesize, or process, or present, the phenomenology of place, the biological content of the samples and anthropological aspects researched, discovered, observed."
Beatriz Neves Fernandes
"Water is an integral part of my artistic imaginary,..., a multimedia body of work focused not only on the aesthetic qualities of this element, among which transparency and fluidity, but also focused on the intention of establishing a pictorial-metaphorical register of the process of artistic creation of artistic creation, which I understand as an aquatic journey of osmosis from the inside to the exterior, the transport of the idea into matter through the creative impulse. The water as a primordial flow of creation and fertility, a means of transport of nutrients and ideas that build on matter, from the soil to the work of art."
Catarina Gentil
"Water has brought people together since the beginning of humanity (...). Water is connection. Connection. Communication. Continuity. Community. It is a map, a network that sustains everything, that holds and connects the world, that links continents and consequently, people. And springs, more than water, bring people. (...) Water is a malleable matter with symbolic meaning... its manipulation, transformation (...) and the final production of sculptures and installations with the objective of (...) Putting in evidence, in an artistic and poetic way, these same connections that otherwise would be invisible and abstract".
Ângela Dias e Maria João Gromicho
"Passing the project "Raíz Solar" through the environment and context provided by RAMA-Residências Artísticas, we intend to deepen our practice, confront our purpose on the look, appreciation, accompaniment and challenges of the Residency, to reach new paths... This project made by two people intends to build an exhibition of drawing and painting around a certain meaning of the sense of Life. A sense of Human Life with its interactions with natural, animal, social and affective life in its personal and universal world."
Elizabeth Langford
My practise is site specific, I let the environment inform the process which becomes the work. For the residency I would like to spend the first 5 days in the landscape, during which time I will investigate the local conditions - climate, geology and plant life. I will record my observations, and then spend some days processing my findings in the studio during which time I would welcome insights. Given the setting, I imagine that a lot of the work will be made in collaboration with the surrounding, I look forward to the possibility of developing a pigment unique to RAMA.
Gwendolyn van der Velden
"In this residency I’m developing, how to present a work of my ongoing collection of conversations about women and their experiences on intersectionality, the patterns and their geographical, social, cultural and historical relations. By inviting them to be portrayed and to record our conversations and inviting them to become part of a visually registration of the multiple patterns that concern the intersectionality of women.
The idea is to place this process in the context of 3 performances, using the workspace, to be an experimental stage, where I can develop a powerful visual statement.
The 10 th , 24th and the 31 of October are days for visualising the performance in progress, which may be attended and participated by public, by invitation and by a signing up."
António Bokel
Through research on the dialogue between man, nature, technology and the “New Normality”, I come to re-establish a journey of cultural affections and disaffections between two cultures, Brazil and Portugal, countries that are linked by a long history of relationships and cultural shocks. I intend to promote and question the best of this long and necessary exchange, being a spokesperson for cultural miscegenation and an ancestry almost extinct by the dream of distorted progress
Franka Struys
“Connectedness”... being in nature is essential for me. More in particular, being at the Atlantic coast, my living and working area. The cliffs, beaches, sea, wind, sun. Feeling and enjoying the power of the elements, the connection with nature. Letting go of rational thinking. Finding balance, harmony and rhythm. In my paintings I pursue to communicate these experiences and sensations through simplification, organic abstractions, colors, materials. I recently started to experiment with mineral pigments collected from the cliffs at the beach, and other natural materials, to deepen the possibilities of painting."
Sofia Castanheira
"Through ceramics, drawing, photography and performance, I intend to continue this exploration of Being, of myself, of what it means to exist in its most basic state. Counting on contact with other artists, I believe it will be extremely beneficial to be a part of of an inter-growth experience, taking the opportunity to get to know a village where nature continues to be the point of greatest prominence and admiration, thus also having the possibility of meeting people who live daily with this environment... during my time in RAMA I intend to develop a work that has the freedom to develop myself simultaneously."
Jéssica Gaspar
"...all my work is based on a deep connection with nature, flourishing from fieldwork and interaction with it, from the observation of its growth cycles and the passage of time on organic forms. I seek to explore the dynamics of various materials such as lichens, fungi, water, fire, smoke and light, working alongside with video and sound capture instruments in order to be able to absorb part of this organic essence and transport it into the interior of the exhibition space, creating more engaging pieces that stimulate different senses."
Claudia Lima
"the light that transforms it into a theatre of beings, totemic or anthropomorphic at times, that appear with a density, a weight, a threat that its structure and material constitution denies, but that the look and the imagination connected to it confirms".
José Luís Porfírio
Ana Caetano
"... I intend to go to the essence, to slow down, to listen, to feel, to work TIME in another way involving myself as much as possible with NATURE and its rhythms ... I intend to use my BODY and the space that surrounds it , as well as the MOVEMENT of one and the other, for a plastic exploration, to create IMAGES, videos. Body and nature in motion, in time. Or is it the movement of time in the body and in nature? "
Sean Negus
“Hauntology & Ephemera(l) Saudades: A Transmedia Poetic of the Archive,” a transdisciplinary artistic project that explores the influences of Po.Ex, with special regard for their history of integration and synthesis of visuality with the poetic. The radical experimentation and boundarylessness of their artistic approaches inspire my own. As an artist, I am also interested in the bricoleur approach defined by Jacques Derrida where every tool is a potential ally in the creative act. My experiments with various media and my ambition to transcend and blur boundaries where expressively relevant are a central part of my practice."
David Correia Gonçalves
"...I seek a space to focus. Concentrate. A place that instead of receiving, or imposing images created by someone - posters, advertising, traffic lights with facades as background, I can relate to the most natural, the least touched. The stones, the frost, the night, not having to climb stairs or take advantage of lifts to move vertically. Time. What will leave here? From these dynamics concentrated in space and time ? Good things have no name. "
Duarte Filipe
"...sharing knowledge between artists will be essential, and what I can also contribute to this community, to structure and develop new ideas, to shape the material for new projects and enable the act of creating..."
Patrícia Timóteo
"...continue the work, related to collage, drawing, impermanence of the exhibition. Concentration (immersion), decision, economy of gesture, are other subjects that I value and I want to continue working. In this time of residence I try to deepen the ability to listen ...make it more and more ...precise. I also hope that this reflection - training - will bring us all new impressions in sharing with other artists, curators, RAMA collaborators and the local community. The place, the silence and the surrounding nature of Maceira transmit me quietness to work".
Stefanía Ólafsdóttir
I intend to continue exploring my installation work, creating a mural and performance in conversation with the local environment, a collaborative project in which my co-creators are nonhuman. Gathering water from local sources will contextualise the mural in its local resources. This will be an investigation of the intersection of the water with which I print, my body, and human communities. At RAMA I am particularly interested in being located in the countryside, so close to nature, yet working within the walls of human construction. I seek to explore this border of human settlement and nature, this ecotone, in hopes of informing the narrative with which we can move into the future.
Elsie Phipps
I am currently working with some photographs of the Aqueduto das Águas Livres taken by Diogo Saldanha because I think they convey something special, almost sacred about the hidden insides of these structures built for no grandiose purpose but to transport water through the landscape. There is something bodily about how the architecture moves water which sustains life and I would like to use this to explore how we in turn connect to the landscape.
HElena Valsecchi
"Through a reflection on painting in a broader perspective, including pictorial installation and, in it, physical phenomena such as shadows and reflections, I’m investigating the dimensions of life / death / sacred / memory through the rhetoric of the double, and their experience in the contemporary context. During my residency at RAMA, I intend to deepen these aspects in the local dimension, through a specific research on the region’s museology and history. "
Diogo Magro Viegas
“My work consists in recreating natural or manufactured objects, providing concepts of appropriation of elements that we consider an exception to our practices, whose toxic and prone to oppressive approach reveals a feeling of strangeness and disconnection in our habitat. In RAMA project, I intend to integrate myself in a more environmental context, using my coexistence with an unknown territory, which may result in different ways of acting and thinking. ”
Silvia Pallini
"I see nature as a home, a single being, a unity, indivisible, ... in RAMA, with the territory understood as nature, craftsmen and farmers, to be able to develop and create materials such as paints and coal and other natural products derived from the agricultural process that can be reused in pictorial research"