HABITAT

Habitat - Landra
Galeria Municipal de Almada

June-September 2025
Lisbon, Portugal

imagens António Jorge Silva

Solo show curated by Filipa Oliveira

In Habitat, they return to the forest as a foundational space — where there were once mixed oak forests, with an abundance of wood, stone, water, and food, where humans did not break with the world, but lived with it. It was possible to live with little, because what little there was was shared. And the ground, that was full of possibilities. In the past, the territory we now call Portugal was covered by mixed oak forests, where human and non-human communities coexisted in balance. From those times, knowledge remained: houses made with what the land provided, food that fell from the trees, ways of life where the common was abundant.

With the empire and the logic of profit, the land began to be measured, sold, emptied. The vacant lots, the hills, and the fields were abandoned. But there still lies a chance for the future.

The exhibition is not a nostalgic return. It is a summons. The Landra propose a sensitive archaeology of dwelling: they return to the land, to matter, to the human scale. They think of the house as an extension of the ecosystem, permeable, transient, alive. A house that doesn't cut off the world, but prolongs it. It's not about opposing the wild to the human, but about recognizing that intimacy can be born from porosity with the world — and that true wealth may be this: being in relationship.

Tolentino de Mendonça wrote that "one cannot truly inhabit a place without also inhabiting the time that traverses it." Habitat is this exercise of presence, of slowness and of care: an attempt, through art, to listen to the earth again.

Text by Filpa Oliveira

Cabeceiras de Basto

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