* STATEMENT for CONVIVÊNCIA *

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.