Newsletter  277
June 2025

After a a record breaking amount of winter rains, the landscape was more colourful than ever. And now the sun is shining, the wild oat is ripening and residents are inspired by the burst of natural energy. 

In June our residents are Ingrid Simons (visual artist, Holland), Beate Schnaithmann (musician; Germany, Switzerland), Frans van Lent (multimedia; Holland), Pluto Sotiropoulos (musician, Australia), Guiseppe da Salvatore (scientist, writer; Switzerland, Italy), Elleke van Gorsel (visual artist, Holland), Gerry van der Linden (Poet, Holland), Ruth Baettig (performance; Switzerland) and Olivia Bliss (multimedia; UK) and Seema Lyer (writer; UK, living in Germany).

On 31 May we had an Open Studio with participations of Ingrid Simons, Beate Schnaithmann, Frans van Lent, Pluto Sotiropoulos, Guiseppe da Salvatore, Ruth Beattig, Elleke van Gorsel and Gerry van der Linden. The event started with a small concert by Mauro dilemma and Beate Schnaittman. After the concluding dinner, Elisa Mira and José Rodrigues were singing Cantes Alentejanos and much more. More details will follow in the next update of this newsletter.

Frans van Lent (Holland) is performance artist. At OBRAS he made six videos of his personal experience while walking in nature: short, simple and serene.
Most videos are symmetric: it begins and ends with nothing and in the middle an activity takes place and disappears. In some cases he collaborates with another artist. For instance: on 2 June, 2pm he dipped his hand in the Ribeira de Terra, while at the same moment Martine Viale dipped her hand in the river Têt in France.
Another collaboration was with Beate Schnaithmann on cello. The work contemplates on the Doppler effect. 

Elleke van Gorsel (Holland) continued a project that she started in Norway and Iceland. She makes macro photos of plant parts. She extends the photo-prints with painting that seems to be part of the photo, and surrounds the photo with a painted or embroidered frame that relates to the subject of the photo.  Her work is in the same time delicate and powerful, intimate and expressive.   

Olivia Bliss (UK) is both jazz musician and visual artist. She came back to OBRAS after 15 (!) years. Until recently she touched printmaking, but she built up a serious allergy for acrylates, forcing her to leave her job. Her battle for safer working conditions resulted in legal fights and documents full of black lines. She converted her frustrations into three beautiful songs, that she sung both at OBRAS and in a marble quarry.
The only acrylate free printmaking techniques are cyanotypes and gel printing. Olivia experimented with both, and made an impressing show with them.   

Beate Schnaithman (Germany, living in Switzerland) came with an Ischias problem that seemed serious enough to have several days of complete bed rest. But after exposure to the Alentejo sun, a swim in the pool, a massage by Fatima and an environment with no stress, the pain largely disappeared. Beate found back the joy of playing and started many collaborations: with Mauro Dilemma (a small concert for cello and piano), Ingrid Simons (painting in the field, while listening to Beate playing), Pluto Sotiropoulos (accompanying his singing), Frans van Lent (acting in his video Doppler), Larry Feign (playing a Chinese, 18th century Flower Boat song) and Juliette Sallin (trials, resulting in future collaboration).
Beate gave a very interesting artist talk, concluding with playing several pieces. The first one was from the 17th century and deeply melancholic and the last one was from the 21th century hypnotising in its rhythmic power.
And Beate was so fortunate to have her birthday during her residency, resulting flower power and sweetness.     

Giuseppe da Salvatore (Italy, living in Switzerland) is a philosopher, currently working on a book on more-than-human perspectives. In his residency at OBRAS two years ago, Giuseppe was writing an essay on the Anthropocene. This time he reflected on vagueness, which brought him among other issues, at the environmental discussion on rewilding, the political seek for free spaces, the issue of the cultural bubbles and the geographical “nothingness”.
Giuseppe gave his artist talk the shape of a walk with five stops; on each of them he told a small anecdote and explained an element of vagueness. It was exciting because he combined fun and originality with philosophical considerations. Giuseppe led us via Goethe (Italian journey), Le Corbusier (The Bunker Bubble), señor Guardado (living in Albacete, La Mancha, probably the emptiest and flattest place of Europe) to Mozart (Le Nozze di Figarro) and more.   
Although the pedometer stopped already at 600 steps, it was one of the most enriching walks we have ever done.

Juliette Sallin (Switzerland) is dyeing on silk with natural pigments. Part of her residency was to add a new element to her art work: performance. She prepared a ceremony for her fellow residents, starting with a meditation to bring the focus on our relation with plants. A second part of the ceremony was an invitation to all, to dip plants into dying fluids and drip, splash or brush on wettened silk. After some twenty minutes the tissue had got its appearance due to the collective action.  

Seema Lyer (UK, living in Germany) is first of all a writer, but she is extending her repertoire towards theatre and film. She wrote sketches as a step up for a film script; the working title is The Lonely Men Epidemic.
Seema is also working on theatre performances (spoken word, stand-up, improtheatre). She invited fellow residents for try outs of three sketches, all about councillors (a psychotherapist, a life coach and a school mentor), and all were cynical, absurd and very hilarious. 

Gerry van der Linde (Holland) was working on several new poems. But she also came to cope with the grief of the recent decease of her brother. She wrote two moving poems on her relation with him.
Gerry also created a series of small installations, exhibited them on the walls of her apartment and requested her fellow residents to write some words about them.  
 

Pluto Sotiropoulos (Australia) is a singer/songwriter. He worked on a project based on storytelling, subconscious and dream states. The results are the template for an album.
Generally, Pluto’s songs took the form of emerging out of and dissolving back into nothingness. Pluto impressed all with his intimate and introvert manner of singing. He accompanied his lyrics with simple acoustic guitar melodies.
Pluto also had a collaboration with Beate Schnaithman (cello) and in working on music for the performance of Ingrid Simons that was recorded on video by Pedro Cabral.

Ingrid Simons (Holland) had a 2,5-months residency. She painted, made performances and did ceramic work.
For many years already she is very consistent in the stile for her oil painting: very pasty, large brush strokes, few colours and largely abstract. But her inspiration has moved from landscapes, via the colours of the night, to wind. She added a new colour to her pattern: salmon. And for the first time she experimented with acryl on paper.
She also did performances, partly in collaboration with Beate Schnaitmann (cello) and Pedro Cabral (video recording).  She painted with Indian ink on a 5-meter-long strip of paper; one time in a flower field and one time at the shore of a marble quarry lake.
In her the ceramics work she made a 1x1m tableau depicting a night sky and painted on two 60cm high vases.

Ruth Baettig (Switzerland) is a performance artist. In 2023 she had a residency in which she performed in a marble quarry: a tiny creature in a giant space. This year she did the opposite (although dressed in the same tight red suit): she prominently occupied a micro-cosmos: a video projection inside a can showed her frolicking and struggling in high grass. A second video performance was recorded in the swimming pool and projected on the bottom of an ancient wash basin. Both installations were surrealistic, intriguing and exceptionally beautiful.

Also good to know:

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Evora will become the European Capital of Culture in 2027.  A great achievement and a great challenge for “our” city. According to the jury, key for this victory was the theme that Evora choose: “vagar”, which means wander without hurry. It refers to the vision that “slow” can bring better quality in daily live. 
We intend to participate with a thematic program on “marble” as related to art, architecture, history, landscape, geology and economy. For this we established a fruitful collaboration with the University departments of Geoscience, Arts&Design and Landscape, Environment&Planning, the municipality of Vila Viçosa, the museum of Evora and the Marble sector.
We propose a program covering the whole year of 2027. It will consist of ten exhibitions, ten site specific performances, some field trips and city walks, two symposia and a contest. At this moment we are in the final stage of making appointments with potential partners; all signs are very encouraging and promising.
A draft of the full proposal is available on request. A summary is on this page.

Our proposal will be submitted as soon as the tender opens, which is now scheduled for the end of June 2025.
In the scope of preparing this proposal we made a book showing some 60 marble-related projects of OBRAS residents over the past 15 years.   

On 26 September – 4 October Sarah Pedlow will give a workshop on embroidery. Both traditional applications and contemporary art work will be treated. See this page for more info.

In 2027 a group residency is considered: Embodied Geologic Research, guided by Nina Elder (USA). See this page for more info, and www.ninaelder.com for more info on the artist.

Some more about OBRAS:

OBRAS has its main residence in Portugal and an auxiliary residence in Holland. The Holland residence will be closed during most of 2025 for a renovation.

The annual report on the OBRAS activities in 2024 is now available on request.

More organisational info on OBRAS (goals, codes of Conduct, members of the board) is on this page.

OBRAS is working on a continuation of its activities for the long term. For this, the management will be rejuvenated and the organisational structure will be slightly adapted. It will be done gradually in 2025-2027, to make sure that the residency program will continue largely unchanged.  More information with follow in updates of this newsletter.

The fox that we spotted for the first time in September (during an Open Studio !), is now visiting our house every few days, saying hello to our cats.