Artist
Eunice Pais
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).
Barreiro in Ecologies
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 develops a practice that brings together photography, video, sound and material processes as forms of listening and relation, operating in contexts where ecology, memory and labour intersect. Working across liminal spaces between archive and lived experience, her work resists closed narratives and extractive modes of representation, proposing an ethics of care through gestures of containment, opacity and material transformation.
Francisco Menezes works across photography, installation and sculpture to question the role of objects in the material and symbolic organization of the contemporary world. Situated between representation and presence, his practice exposes mechanisms of accumulation and fixation, using minimal formal operations to reveal the invisible infrastructures that shape everyday life.
Guillermo Vidal develops a photographic practice rooted in experiences of social invisibility, working in close relation with contexts marked by precarity and structural absence. Rejecting both spectacle and distance, his images operate at the threshold of visibility, proposing asustained ethics of looking grounded in proximity, presence and continuity.
Jungeun Lee explores experiences of displacement, care and unstable belonging, using photography in dialogue with performance and gesture. Her work brings together intimate and structural dimensions, family, domestic labour, migration and cultural inheritance, to trace processes of transformation and silent resistance, where the body becomes a site of memory and care.
Maria Peixoto Martins interrogates surveillance as a defining condition of contemporary life, working with appropriated and degraded images captured in contexts of control. Through irony and discomfort, her practice exposes the normalization of the vigilant gaze and places the viewer in an ambivalent position, revealing systems in which continuous exposure has become the norm.
Members of the jury:
Jayne Dyer - co-artistic director of the Bienal Fotografia do Porto
Virgílio Ferreira - founder and art director of the Photography Platform Ci.CLO and of the Bienal Fotografia do Porto
Vera Carmo - independent curator, lecturer and researcher