In my works as a
director, producer and
audiovisual creative,
I focus on the relationship
between people and the
space they inhabit.
During the last ten years my projects have been exploring different ways how to manifest cultural heritage in territories. I have been touching aspects of continuity, transformation, and I also wanted to convey how environmental changes affect everyday life.
My research raises the main question that travels throughout my work –
‘In a new complex world which is constantly affected by migration, climate change, population growth and economic crisis, how is the concept of living in the nearest future is being imagined?’
While searching for answers, I seek to generate reflections by using different strategies and audiovisual formats such as experimental videos, series and documentary material. I work with multidisciplinary teams, and we all carry a continuous exercise of actively listening to the participants of the projects.
My first piece on this path was named ‘Threshold Sounds’ (2013). Together with two musicians we explored different sounds in an abandoned space of a defunct company ‘Oliva’, in a town in the north of Portugal. Later on, the same year, we continued the experimental line and carried out two more interventions in Portugal. Together with a Galician musician and artist Junma Lodo we created a piece called ‘Noise Vandalism’, and later we recorded street improvisations with a free jazz band ‘Albatre’ that gave birth to the video ‘Lost in Abrantes’.
During 2015, in a creative residency in Abrantes, I developed a documentary short film ‘Exercises to Know a City’, where together with local people I investigated the connection of their identity and roots in their own territory.
This experience inspired me to find out even more about the relationship between people and their homes. Therefore, in 2017 a nine-part documentary series ‘Habitar’ was founded. Together with a co-director Verónica Wüst we were meeting and interviewing different people, exhibiting the diversity of their homes and landscapes that were surrounding them, also telling their personal stories they shared with us.
During this project we understood that cities were growing faster, and their inhabitants have less and less influence on the way the cities were being built. That is why I embarked on my next documentary called ‘Ciudad Barrio’ (2022). The axis of the documentary is the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago de Chile – its conflicts, rich history and an important role for the capital became the main references for the film. The process was very special because citizens participated willingly thanks to the active neighborhood organization.
My current exploration leads me to continue searching for other senses and go beyond visual expression. Together with a music researcher Luis Felipe Saavedra, we started the development of the documentary series ‘La Otra Tierra’, which is based on sound recording and atentive listening – it proposes a new way of understanding the relationship between people and their environment where sound is playing an important role.
