Artist
Guillermo Vidal
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.
Invisible Line
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.
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