Barreiro in Ecologies
Eunice Pais
This project explores the shifting ecologies of Barreiro through its post-industrial architecture and tidal rivers. Two chapters: Architecture and Rivers — document the interdependence between decay and renewal in landscapes shaped by agriculture, tide mills, and community rituals.
Through photographs and fictional cartographies, the work traces migrant geographies, ecological practices, and embodied knowledge. Respectful visual distance questions extractive image-making while mapping forms of belonging through land, water, and memory.
Eunice Pais is a Luso-Mozambican artist who works with video, photography, sound, and sculpture—particularly metal and textiles—to investigate themes of visibility, invisibility, ecology, memory, and labour as dissident and counter-colonial strategies. Her practice operates within speculative and post-nature frameworks, engaging material, spatial, and sonic forms to unsettle extractive logics, imperial modes of knowledge production, and fixed archival methodologies.
Rather than offering resolution, Pais is interested in opacity, porosity, and the productive space of the non-answer, allowing meaning to remain embodied, fragmented, and relational. Through gestures of repetition, contamination, and material transformation, her work foregrounds forms of rebellion that emerge within—and against—histories of extraction and coloniality embedded in everyday structures, landscapes, and bodies.
Her practice is shaped by transnational histories between Portugal and Mozambique, approached not as identity markers but as sites of tension, inheritance, and refusal.
In 2020, she founded PAIS Agency, a photography studio and production agency focused on the intersection of environmental and social justice. Since 2023, her work has been exhibited across the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, with recent and forthcoming exhibitions in Portugal and across Europe.
She is a recipient of the Alumni Exchange Innovation Fund from the U.S. Embassy in Portugal, and her project Sargassum is supported by Directorate-General for the Arts (Portugal).