Artist statement
Reflecting my own path, I established Noitarder, an artistic structure based in Porto, Portugal, that aims at crossing Philosophy, Literature and Theater, and conceive the stage as a place of questioning, of opening of new worlds, of listening to different words and voices.
The first show, Longe, premiered in 2018, and was a lecture-perfomance on memory and loss. Our second performance, amor.demónio, premiered in 2021, and was created after studying the lives and works of real and fictional nuns, trying to find possible futures in readings from the past and present. Ruído, the third show I directed and wrote in Noitarder, is a scientific dissemination piece that focuses on astrophysics and gravitational waves, searching for parallels between the immensity of time in physics and in day-to-day life.
I would also like to present some work I developed outside of Noitarder. In 2020, I was selected for École des Maîtres, the first playwright edition, and I wrote Carne, a play that explores family dynamics and the embodiment and disembodiment of language. This text was published in Portugal, translated to French and Italian, and presented in Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium.I would also like to highlight INVASÃO!, a play that I wrote and directed in 2021 at Teatro Experimental do Porto, which questions nationality, the writing of History and the silencing of some voices. The premiere of this play was, unfortunately, interrupted because of a problem with the theater, but I hope it will be rescheduled soon.
As a creator, I really like to think about how the stage can become a place of thought, and how language can create new worlds, always aware of how language fails in expressing everything. Theater brings to the scene new ways of meaning and finds expression for domains language cannot communicate by itself. I still do some academic work too, on seminars and conferences, and I also write for short-films and fanzines. I wrote a poem about food and History, Fogo Lento. All these different “modes” of using language interest me very much, and I really like to find ways to cross them with the living images theater can provide.
My work shows critical views on society’s basic structure, questioning our relationship with our conscience, with God, with the family structure or with the ideas of country and nations. I think that theater can be a very speculative place, and the stage can be somewhere where silences are heard and listened to, where big themes and little themes are discussed, where the audience can conceive together a new possible future, or idea of community, or idea of past and history. Theater is, for me, a way of thinking outside our strictly discursive frame, a way of making new meanings that await shapes.