Invisible Line
Guillermo Vidal
Invisible Line is a documentary project developed beneath the Santa Apolónia bridge in Lisbon, where around fifty people live in a space conceived solely as transit infrastructure. Initiated in 2020, the project remains ongoing.
The bridge, as an urban structure, establishes an invisible separation between two overlapping worlds: the city that circulates above and the community that organizes itself below. This line — not physical, but structural — defines an intermediate territory, where new ways of inhabiting emerge and where tents, objects, and everyday gestures reconfigure notions of permanence.
The project does not seek to represent homelessness as a statistical or exceptional phenomenon, but rather to observe how life reorganizes itself within a residual space of the city. The images are constructed from fragments — present bodies, suggested bodies, and absent bodies — revealing a silent intimacy shaped by traces, adaptations, and rituals.
Between public space and improvised shelter, a micro-society forms, with its own identity, in constant transformation. Beneath the bridge, what usually remains outside the field of vision becomes a direct reflection of the city and the collective choices that sustain it.
Guillermo Vidal (b. 1989) is a Portuguese photographer whose perspective was shaped by the transition between Caracas, where he was born, and Murtosa, a coastal town where he grew up. This experience of displacement fuels his interest in social invisibility and in the ways human beings inhabit fragile or transitional contexts.
His work focuses on long-term projects, combining the rigour of documentary practice with a restrained, poetic, and reflective visual language. Through close attention to gestures, rituals, and silences, Vidal examines how political and economic structures shape everyday life, exploring resilience and faith as ways of relating to the world. His practice privileges time, listening, and an ethical commitment to the people he photographs.
His trajectory includes publications in PÚBLICO newspaper and an exhibition at Narrativa atelier in Lisbon, as part of the Narrativa Masterclass.
Currently based in Lisbon, he develops projects in the city where he lives as well as in South
Asia, particularly in Nepal.