Pedro Matias (Lisbon, 1984 - They/Them, He/His) is an artist, researcher & film-maker based in Amsterdam, exploring immersive environments that play with alternative dynamics of participation, new flows of alternative knowledge, ‘aesthesis’ and performativity. Their work facilitates time based spaces to encounter the stranger matter; the stranger body; the stranger self. Pedro’s work shape-shifts across mediums, as a necessary feature of its form, composition, and politics, operating in liminal spaces of regeneration. They understand spaces (of intimacy) assembled in-between the familiar and the stranger and facilitate fluid and caring supportive structures, as support of agitation and instability, to empower the queer (human and more-than-human) potential for political action and trans*formation. Against fixity and stagnation Pedro searches for performativity in matter and its agency while longing for a utopian intimate soft futurity. For the past years, Pedro has been developing multidimensional landscapes to trigger the embodied impulse to imagine and speculate about other possible futures, towards body and ecological awareness. They facilitate speculative touch as a methodology of being in’ touch’. Furthermore, Pedro is interested in the performativity of haptics to investigate how to prompt embodied affective flows that unsettle one’s bodily ecosystem. Pedro is one of the co-founders of Driewieler Collectief (2010-2020), and currently developing a collaborative artist-run research network - Iridescent Institute of Desire, focused on de/composing the notion of stable structures and (re)imagine collaboration from the perspective of eternal event of ‘desiring’. Pedro Matias holds a MFA from Sandberg Institute (Fine Arts Department) and a MA (Philosophy - Aesthetics) from the New University of Lisbon. They have been a guest teacher at Falmouth School of Art (UK), AKI ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL), Gerrit Rietveld Academie (NL) and HzT, Universitat der Kunste Berlin (GER). Pedro’s individual and collaborative practices have been recipients of several dutch funding grants and presented in platforms such as Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, E-WERK (GER), Haus der Elektronischen Künste (HEK - CHE), Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea (PT), Het Hem (NL), Cabaret Voltaire (Manifesta11 - CHE). Furthermore Pedro has presented their moving-image outcomes in Festivals across Europe, Iceland, China and USA.

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*Convivência de Matérias*
*Poetics of a Practice*

(‘Convivência’: a practice of living-with through shared duration, mutual implication, and partial opacity)

I have learned to distrust the speed with which we arrive at places. Some forms of relation only become possible when we remain long enough to stop being visitors. It is from this kind of inhabitation that my artistic practice emerges.

My work explores forms of relation between bodies, materials, technologies, and environments, investigating how vulnerability is not contained within an isolated subject but distributed through the relations that continuously constitute us. Water has accompanied my research for many years, and more recently I have come to recognise the watershed as a structure capable of reorganising not only my subject matter, but also my methodology.

A watershed brings together forms of *convivência* (a practice of living-with) that are often difficult to perceive as interconnected. Water connects places we understand as separate, moves across different temporalities, and brings together communities, organisms, sediments, infrastructures, and memories without reducing them to a single whole. This continuity has become an artistic methodology.


Through my research in the Lima River basin, and now along the Zêzere River basin, I explore how a hydrological system transforms not only a landscape but also the ways of remaining within it. The territory is not simply where the artwork happens; it becomes what reorganises the conditions through which the work is made.

My practice does not seek to produce knowledge about a place, but to learn from the relationships that already sustain it. *Convivência* precedes the practice; implication transforms it. I do not arrive to explain or represent a territory, but to become progressively involved in the relations that already exist there, accepting that I too will be transformed through this encounter.



Accompanying has therefore become a central method in my practice. To accompany means to return, listen, wait, and respond. It requires accepting that some forms of knowledge emerge only through duration, attention, and openness to being changed.

This also shapes my relationship with communities and materials. I am interested in learning from the ways inhabitants already live with water, forests, soils, seasonal rhythms, and memories embedded in landscapes. These relationships are not illustrations of the research; they are part of the research itself.


Clay, water, sediments, sound, moving image, and sensing technologies participate as active materials within this process. Rather than seeking complete control, I follow the transformations these materials enable. The artwork becomes a temporary condensation of relations that continue beyond it.

I am interested in developing a practice that learns from the way a watershed exists: through continuity, circulation, interdependence, and transformation. Not as a metaphor, but as a way of reorganising how art can be made.


Like a river, the practice never remains identical to itself. It continues to learn from the places, materials, and forms of *convivência* that precede it.

Press, CATALOGUES & mentions

* beatfm.nl | Kunst in de maak in Kunstuitleen Alkmaar met Pedro Matias | Geert Bouman * Telegraaf | Beurs als springplank voor ’verloren generatie’ kunstenaars | Paola van de Velde (NL) * Lost Painters | Springboard Art Fair | Niek Hendrix (NL) * Badische Zeitung - Kunst | Die trinationale Ausstellung Regionale 23 zeigt Sehnsucht nach Nähe | Dietrich Roeschmann (GER) * Dear Kraftwerk | Leon Kruijswijk & PS (NL) * Subject of the Email | PS & Our Polite Society & Jules van den Langenberg (Curator) (NL) *

* I am NOT Tino Seghal - (Driewieler Collectief) | Francesco Bonam (UK) * Contemporary Performance Almanac 2013 (Driewieler Collectief) | Caden Manson (USA) * Cabaret der Künstler Zunfthaus Voltaire (Driewieleer Collectief) | Manifesta 11, (NL/CHE) * Bienal de Cerveira (Driewieler Collectief) (PT) * Finalistas Pintura 2007’08 | FBAUL (PT) * Desenho Drawing | FBAUL (PT) *