When Thinking is Doing
My name is Antônio Frederico Lasalvia and I am originally from Brazil, but I am currently based in Italy. My background in architecture (FAUP) and art (The New Centre) led me toward an interdisciplinary approach that values site-specificity, manual techniques and practical experimentation. Between 2022 and 2025 I have collaborated with the Porto-based studio FAHR 021.3, moving across architecture, scenography, sculpture, curation, and urban design. In 2023 I relocated to Topolò/Topolove, a rural village in northern Italy and have since worked closely with the Robida collective and Associazione Topolò/Topoluove. My artistic practice follows an ethos of economy: achieving the greatest effect with the least intervention, using what is at hand. Recently, I have been interested in the epistemological potential of the mediums of audio and video, as I have documented artist residencies and creative processes within my community.
Much of my work unfolds in collaborative contexts, both within established art collectives and in temporary constellations formed through residencies, exhibitions, or site-specific interventions. I am drawn to the dynamics of shared authorship and the emergent potential of collective processes, not only as a way of working, but as a political, aesthetic and metaphysical stance. My current research interests revolve around questions of time, chance, and speculation, particularly in relation to the built environment. I am also engaging with critical spatial practices, exploring how agency is distributed across materials, tools, and processes in order to understand how these notions reshape our conceptions about authorship and collective making. Some of my recent collaborative works include "Log" - a collective infrastructure built in Topolò/Topolove in the context of the Uncommon Fruits project with Diogo Amaro and Madalena Vidigal - and "O Mármore e a Murta" - a sculptural investigation into mineral and vegetal matters with FAHR 021.3.
When Thinking is Doing is a situated, research-based practice exploring how spatial and environmental understanding emerges through embodied making. It investigates how collective imagination and long-term engagements with a place take on the textures of materiality. The proposal draws from my ongoing work in Topolò/Topolove (IT), where I’ve been co-developing relational practices through craft, radio, curation, editorial projects and the collaborative transformation of an abandoned rural context.
I approach making not as a means to an end, but as an epistemological act. As such, different techniques are understood as information vehicles, or ways of attuning to the memory embedded in the material world – either in the form of artifacts, architectures or landscapes. In this sense, I see tools, matter and labour as co-authors of spatiality. Thus, the physical world can be interpreted not only as a direct consequence of human deliberation, but also as an effect of other-than-human agency. My work seeks to disclose these relations in order to imagine other forms of commoning and placing, which are assembled as collective sites of transmission and experimentation.
Rooted in the ethics of alterity and coexistence, my practice challenges extractive models of authorship and knowledge production. Instead, I propose a methodology of attunement, reciprocity and collaboration. The goal is not necessarily to scale up, but to deepen and (re)discover relations between things that matter. Within LINA, I would like to share this approach through workshops, collective publishing or other site-specific formats that grow from the dialogue with host members and local contexts.