Escola Baldia
I’m a Brazilian artist, architect-urbanist and researcher based in Portugal and affiliated with the Institute of Art History at NOVA University of Lisbon. I recently submitted my PhD thesis in Artistic Studies, supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. I hold a degree in Architecture and Urbanism and an MA in Art and Design for Public Space.
My work connects art, spatial practices, and critical urban studies, focusing on the material, affective and political dimensions of places. Grounded in situated knowledges, it unfolds in varied formats according to the territories I engage with, from collective and audio walks to on-site interventions, writing, objects, textile pieces, visual essays and audiovisual installations.
Since 2017, I have been investigating urban vacant lands in Portugal: sites partially or entirely emptied through the deactivation of formal uses and demolition, in the context of deindustrialisation, disinvestment and urban restructuring. This research follows the material traces, memories, informal practices, ecological processes, conflicts, speculation and expectations that continue to shape these places.
This long-term investigation has taken form through academic publications and artistic projects including BALDIO – The Wasteland Archive (ZK/U Berlin, 2024), developed during a fellowship at ZK/U; the audiowalk Marginalia Vegetal (Lisbon, 2024); the co-editing of Deindustrialisation, Still: Visual Essays and Artistic Methodologies (Lab2PT, 2023); the installations No Place Ever Vanishes (Porto, 2021) and Archaeology of the Void (Porto Design Biennale, 2019); the co-curation of the speculative walk series Journeys to the In-Between (MAAT, Lisbon, 2020), with the architecture collective Artéria.
I’m interested in practices that traverse disciplinary and territorial boundaries and in situated forms of knowledge and (un)learning produced through sustained engagement with specific contexts.
Escola Baldia (Baldia School) is an emerging artistic framework for situated (un)learning, developed through long-term research in urban sites emptied by the deactivation of formal uses and demolition, amid deindustrialisation, disinvestment and urban restructuring. Seemingly empty, these terrains remain crossed by material traces, memories, informal practices, ecological processes, conflicts and expectations of transformation. The Portuguese word baldio carries overlapping meanings, referring both to abandoned urban land and to rural land held and managed in common. Escola Baldia works within this semantic tension, approaching these sites as contested places where temporalities, uses, memories, ecologies, property regimes and desires coexist. Without assuming that they are inherently emancipatory, it treats them as places from which to learn about the city and critically examine the processes of urban restructuring, valuation, exclusion and negotiation that become perceptible there. Developed from methods accumulated through research and artistic projects in Porto, Lisbon and Berlin, Escola Baldia is taking shape as a flexible framework for situated inquiry and (un)learning. It brings together fieldwork, walking, listening, archival research, oral testimonies, writing, collection and montage, adjusted to the places investigated. Escola Baldia may unfold through workshops, walks and collective field exercises organised around questions raised by urban vacant lands: ruderal life, urban memory, informal uses, material remains, disputed futures and the suspension of dominant regimes of productivity. These lines of study are shaped by the stories, conflicts, ecologies and forms of access found in each terrain. Shared attention, listening and situated exchange can temporarily alter the relation with a place, creating conditions for different bodies, forms of knowledge and experiences to engage with the sites and with the broader urban processes they make perceptible.