Graduate in BA (Hons) studies in Art and Design History and Practice at Kingston University, London. This course was drawn upon a conceptual framework on art and design theory, history and criticism to address and decode art and design discourses with focus on the contemporary matter, its key issues, debates, tropes, disciplines and scenarios of creation, while it gave me the freedom to self-led hands on creation by using the facilities that the art school which it is held in provided me with.
Current MA Multimedia Art student at Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa with speciality in Transmedia Practices. This course is an organically unified combination of research, creation and experimentation with a transmedia approach in the process and understanding of creation.
As a curator, researcher and multimedia artist, I am interested in the interplay of visual art, design, sound and space. In the moving image, in installations, in visual poetry and visual essays. In books as artefacts, as both objects and readings. Conceptually, in aesthetics and art philosophy.
My work attempts to explore the synergies between the different expressions of art, design and contemporary culture, through the investigation of the concept of “Total Art” that Allan Kaprow initiated articulating as the symbiosis of different media to produce an artwork that functions as an organism that can be enjoyed both in its parts and in its whole, all contributing to a certain end. This could be an installation, the form that Kaprow was alluding to in the now remote times of the 50s in a proto-postmodernism, or a contemporary editorial project, two forms that have been unfairly located in such a faraway distance with each other, among the official order of things. Or a rave, that unites the most innovate art and design media, with music and technologies of sensorial immersion. It is in fact in rave culture and the electronic music scenes where I draw the conceptual thread and formats I have been exploring most recently in my research and where I indeed find the perfect culmination of Kaprow's proposal.
All of the prior leads me to the pursuit of an interdisciplinary mode of thinking and way of conceiving projects, as in art and design collectives or interdisciplinary studios, such as Metahaven. As the result of everything, I stand for the blurring of the performing and functional distinction between the artist and/or designer and the curator, like in artist Danh Vo’s 'Untitled' (2019) at South London Gallery.
My practice oscillates between writing and visual creation through graphic design, photography, drawing, collaging and moving image. For me everything departs from the concept of juxtaposition of the elements that move my attention from a body of research that is made up from literature, exhibitions, films and other manifestations of visual culture. In this respect, I believe that my main process so far has been the mapping of information and the elaboration of critical responses from such.
Those critical responses have mainly gone through the writing format, linked to the methods of art history and critic, curation and the editorial publication, the media I have dedicated more training to in my academic career. Nonetheless, on a personal level, outside of the strictly academic, I have taken those processes of mapping and thinking to a self-exploration of visual creation. I have been able to take a step further in the latter, by moving to Lisbon to study the master in Multimedia Art and starting to get involved with the art community of the city, as in the art residency/creative lab 'Em obras' in Zaratan (2021) and the art residency + collective project with a team of curators, for which the exhibition '[IN]COUNTER' resulted (20-24 April 2023). In such way I have actively been producing artworks and art projects, while still getting involved in their curatorial side. In terms of professionalizing the practice, it has been trascendental to me being the curator of the exhibition 'Manipanzo, o outro eu' at Fundação Cidade de Lisboa (15-21 December 2022), where I had the chance to learn how to take a leading responsibility in a high-scale project, working close with Maria João Mantua, the designer of the exhibition, who has been decades-long working in the Museo Berardo of Lisbon.
I found that the most productive way of organizing this constellation of my concerns, learning baggage and potential inspiration for creation is through their ordination into two conceptual blocks:
The first of those is the relationship of word and image. Post-structuralist theory, in Roland Barthes with his definition of mythologies, Michel Foucault with his notion of relations of power and dominance through representation and Jean Baudrillard with his concept of reality being a simulation, has been transcendental to me as to understand that writing is an active form of representation, that makes up reality at the same level that an image does.
The second conceptual block is related to the understanding of art as the interplay of disciplines whose intention is to build an experience, for the self and for the collective and for the latter, the understanding of art as a social interstice, observed from the prism of relational aesthetics developed by Nicolas Bourriaud. These have shed light for me on the questions of what is art and why it is needed as a labour for society.
In my writings I perceive the increasingly relevant will to vindicate art in a world yet skeptical on valuing art as a productive immaterial capital that indeed requires a force of labour, through addressing the necessity of art in a world strangled by the logics of neoliberal capitalism and needing alternatives that can only pass through the enhancing of the value of community and the collective, asserting that from an existential point of view cultural stimuli is a means to actively make up vital significance and as such it holds an indispensable social capital, and as Jacques Rancière asserts, the path towards an intellectual, individual, subjective emancipation goes through the aesthetic experience, that departs from the self but is also able to be shared in collective in a non-objectifiable way.
In my latest practice, in Lisbon, as I delved into becoming a multimedia artist, I have been mainly reflecting on hybrid art practices linked to the moving image, installation and electronic music with the aim of exploring the synergy between imagescape and soundscape as to appeal to the subject’s emotional innerscapes. As such, my most recent project, 'To transcend an artificial paradise', the final thesis for the MA, is a project-based research through a dissertation and the conception of an installation project based on a video, that drew on the nexus between art and altered states of consciousness as an echo of a transcultural human problem: the need for an experience of 'going out of oneself' to make the present more habitable, while specifically addressing rave culture as its contemporary location.