Opening, Performance: Eduardo Freitas

Sem título combines performance and installation to reflect on the notions of borders, immigration, desire, and the right to remain in a territory. The project’s title makes a critical reference to residence permits, highlighting the shortcomings of an administrative and political system that keeps thousands of people in a state of suspension, waiting for regularisation and for their right to stay to be recognised. Eduardo Freitas’ installation brings together stone sculptures, paper works, and images of the artist’s identification documents, alongside performative actions, to evoke memory, places left behind, and places yet to come. It moves across not only geographies and legal statuses, but also symbolic borders between visibility and erasure. Situated between migration policy and systems of governance, the proposal questions tensions of belonging, access, and exclusion in a context marked by increasingly restrictive migration policies and the intensification of borders. In this scenario, the circulation of bodies, languages, and cultures becomes a field of political, social, and affective negotiation. Starting from the artist’s personal condition as a Brazilian migrant, the project develops from a position of displacement and listening, shaped by third-party voices — close stories, accounts, and shared experiences that rarely find space in dominant narratives. In doing so, it opens a fissure in hegemonic discourse, allowing multiple voices to emerge, coexist, and come into friction. BIOGRAPHY Eduardo Freitas (b. 1990, Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil) is a visual artist and researcher. He has lived and worked in Portugal since 2017, where he has developed a sustained artistic practice. He is currently a PhD candidate in Contemporary Art at the University of Coimbra, supported by a fellowship from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). He holds a Master’s degree in Artistic Practices in Visual Arts from the University of Évora (2019), a specialization in Visual Poetics (2015), and a Bachelor’s degree in Sculpture from the School of Music and Fine Arts of Paraná (2012). As an immigrant artist, he blends different artistic languages to address the experience of migration and linguistic boundaries, exploring the connections between everyday life and politics, illusion and reality, irony and critique, and reflecting on the relationships between materiality and language, the individual and the collective, and the body and labor. His practice combines stone sculpture, contemporary ceramics, performance, and action sculpture, exploring the acts of sculpting, cooking, eating, and serving as artistic practices that engage with others. He regularly presents his work in solo and group exhibitions, artist residencies, and collaborative projects in Portugal and Brazil. Selected exhibitions include Aos Domingos (OMA Galeria, São Paulo, 2025), Natureza-Morta (Appleton Box, Lisbon, 2024), En.talho (Municipal Gallery of Montemor-o-Novo, 2024), Em.prego (La Junqueira Artists Residency, Lisbon, 2022), and Tracing the Infrathin (Galeria Monitor, Lisbon, 2022). Since 2019, he has maintained an ongoing collaboration as a resident artist at Associação Pó de Vir a Ser in Évora. In 2016, he participated in the Biennial Caixa de Novos Artistas, a traveling exhibition presented in seven Brazilian capitals. His work has received several awards and distinctions in national and international competitions, including first prize at the Jov’Arte Biennial (Loures), the Artistic Intervention Prize at the 23rd International Art Biennial of Cerveira, and an honorable mention at the 17th International Biennial of Artistic Ceramics of Aveiro. In Brazil, he has been awarded in multiple salons and exhibitions, including the Praia Grande Art Salon, the Luiz Sacilotto Art Salon, the Piracicaba Contemporary Art Salon, the National Ceramics Salon, and SESI Contemporary Art, among others.