The works created for the EDP Foundation New Artists Award 2025 exhibition take this haptic dimension further and add a new layer of sensory attraction through the use of small electronic mechanisms, used for the first time by the artist, which bring movement, light, and warmth to them. The result is a set of works that maintain their references to intimacy and self-care, independent of each other but integrating the same organic system and combining molds of familiar objects with natural elements of plant and animal origin, all together undergoing a process of re-signification and invested with new properties. Water and energy animate these works from within, making them vibrate, blow, pulse, drip, sweat, breathe, transforming them into unique, living presences full of humor. The illusory and playful character of these works suggests a choreography of gestures that have already occurred, the ghostly presence of someone who left a tap running, made tea, or failed to close an imaginary window through which the breeze enters, micro events that coexist with the serene radicalism of a trunk that inflates with light to the rhythm of a breath, a bathtub that serves as a habitat for sparkling water lilies and a dewy trunk, a sink where feathers were born, and an impossible, suspended, and inert vegetable garden. These works retain the memory of the original functions of the objects used, while opening up new ontological possibilities about what is plausible in the realm of reality and the world we live in. Animated by a vital breath, these works are simultaneously entertaining and unsettling, hybrid beings that occupy a space of tension between the artificial and the natural, which may even be specimens of a new hybrid nature that is forming from the debris left behind by human activities.
photos bruno lopes
text catarina rosendo