This page shows residents and their projects in 2022.
most recent residents and their projects are in the newsletter.
Other pages show residents and their projects in 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018,  2017,  2016, 2015,  2014,  2012 and 2013  and 2004-2011. 
A visual collage of residents is in this slide show.

This page tells about most of the residencies and related events that took place in 2022. The most recent are in the newsletter.

On 10 September we had a great Open Studio at OBRAS in Evoramonte. The participating artists were Jane Flett, Sophie Tassignon, Iuliia Bugalova, Michael O`Boyle,Stella Whalley and James Bell. Below are their artist statements in blue. 

Jane Flett is a Scottish novelist and poet based in Berlin.
Her fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4, Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize, and published in Electric Literature. She’s the author of the chapbooks "Quick, to the Hothouse" and "Mashnotes", and her poetry has been anthologised in the Best British Poetry.
Jane is also one half of the riot-grrrl band Razor Cunts, a creative writing tutor for The Reader Berlin, and a disturbingly accurate tarot reader. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her swimming naked in lakes, hosting queer events, and rollerskating down Tempelhof runway in hotpants.
At OBRAS, she’s working on:
1. A novel about a feminist goddess cult that arises during an environmental apocalypse. The book explores the difficulty of creating a non-hierarchical society and the repercussions of whole-hearted commitment to chaos.
2. An experimental novella about a woman lost in the wilderness, consisting of 100 chapters of 100 words, and inspired by classic fable forms. It’s rooted in Scottish mythology but undermines the patriarchal heritage of the original tales.
3. A weird short story about a quarantine facility for patients infected with “the Earworm”.

Over the past 20 years, Sophie Tassignon has been working on several musical collaborations in the jazz and avantgarde scene. She has also developed a unique style of voice layering to create tantalizing sound textures which she used in theatre pieces and her debut solo album (RareNoise Records, 2020).
She is currently crafting a new series of sounds during her residency at OBRAS foundation. With these new sonic tapestries, she will create a palette of textures she can use to improvise in a live setting, preparing for her solo performance in 2023 at the New York City Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit.

Iuliia Bugalova is a Ukrainian multimedia artist. During her stay at OBRAS she concentrated on working with a traditional artistic medium - oil painting on canvas.
She feels attracted to those non-verbal elements that can describe her experience of existence with all her senses. Her work can be seen as an attempt to transform it to the visual language of colors and form.
At OBRAS she was inspired by the red colors of the soil, the shapes of deformed trees, the sounds of a pig farm mixed with Symphony#7 by Beethoven and swimming with open eyes.

As part of the Open Studio, Iuliia did a action painting performance, in interaction with singing by Sophie. A video compilation will soon be ready.

Michael O'Boyle is a painter based in the west of Ireland. For his residency, he is creating three monumental geometric wall works in paper along with some smaller canvas works. These microscopic based works are diagrammatic in nature and work with the architecture of the studio to create giant portraits of the invisible.

Stella Whalley is a multi-disciplinary fine artist working in London, UK.
At Foundation OBRAS Stella created a mysterious character in the landscape using video, sound and performance, which has been shot in collaboration with fellow resident James Bell.
 Alongside this, Stella experimented with a series of drawings, prints and paintings that reveal figures semi-abstracted within the environment.
Stella also produced a series of playfully painted, bleeding blue-ink marble tiles based on historical erotic images found at Estremoz market; as well as local characters and creatures from the area.
In the last days of her residency Stella broke her hip (!). She had to stay six more weeks before she could travel home. In this time, she made a series of drawings on marble with pin up girls on crutches. 

James Bell is a British Artist specialising in painting, performance and film. His work responds to his environment, mental health and Queer identity.
 James is also a professional film producer. His film Birthday Boy won the 2021 audience award at BAFTA qualifying Iris Prize Film Festival. 
 At OBRAS he explored two directions.
 Firstly, abstract paintings responding to the landscape. Initial inspiration came from the red ‘no-hunting’ signs contrasting nature’s palette, and by the bleeding sap of the cork trees. 
 Secondly, James has utilised film, photography and blue-ink drawings to create self-portraits. Placed within various locations in and around the residency - he sits and stares into the distance, or lays peacefully.

Rob Monaghan (Ireland) took a dive in a lake of an abandoned marble quarry near to Vila Viçosa, Portugal. He did it for pleasure, but first of all for the art. Rob is working on an exhibition in the Municipal Museum of Estremoz, Portugal (September 2023).
Rob explores human/nature relationships. Recurring themes are ones of belonging, identity, place/time combinations and human intervention with the natural environment.
Rob had artistic residencies at OBRAS-Portugal in 2017, 2018 and 2019. A selection of his findings were exhibited in the Damer House, Tipperary, Ireland (2017), the Babyforest woodlands in West Cork, Ireland (2018) and the  Galeria do Palaçio Barrocal, Evora, Portugal (2019). During his residencies, Rob established long-term collaborations with other artists, resulting in presentations in various galleries and screening environments in Sweden, USA and Ireland.

After his trip in January, Rob returned for a short orientation visit in April. He is scheduled to have an exhibition in 2023 in the Galeria de D. Dinis of the museum of Estremoz. But after having seen the exhibition space in the fortress of Evoramonte he very much prefers that space over the Galeria de D. Dinis and requested us to propose the museum to shift his exhibition to there. He will create some multimedia installations.
Rob also found the time to do a collaborative project with Ingrid Simons: Ingrid dripped Chinese ink in a quarry lake and Rob recorded the result from under water. It caused a pattern of black, grey and white that very much reminds to the brush strokes in Ingrid´s oil paintings.

Esmeralda Cabral (Canada) came back to work on her second book. It is about her personal feelings of having two motherlands or may be, having no motherlands. She grew up on the Azores (Portugal), but lives in Vancouver (Canada). She always feel that is belongs to the land where not is. She contemplates on nostalgia (or better on the Portuguese version: Saudade) and on the impact of globalism on these feelings, but also on food and weather.

Aurélie Ferrière (France, living in Sweden) has a classical violin education and applied her skills in classical orchestras, a punk and bands and more recently in sound scapes created with a modular synthesizer. But the talents and experiences of Aurélie are also in opera staging, scenography, graphics and video. One goal of her residency was to contemplate on whether she should focus on one discipline or approach her various creations as a whole. Another activity was “Boca” (Portuguese for voice). She made a collage on a canvas in the middle of which she burned an opening (suggesting fire is coming out of a mouth) that was partly stitched to close the opening.  In addition, she had impressive jam sessions, both solo and in combination with others, in a wide variety of spaces: in the middle of nature, the big hall, the circular square, the patio, the swimming pool and a marble quarry.   

In 2021 Monica de Miranda (Portugal) was shooting her film: A ILJA: a visual poem on the unknown story of slavery in the Alentejo.
In July 2022 her film will get the premiere in London (more details will follow).
Most of the screenings were done at OBRAS and its direct surroundings. A LIJA is full of visual metaphors. For instance, an actor is always carrying a suitcase with soil and water from his home country. And the destruction of the landscape by marble quarrying symbolizes the damage of black lives.

Emma van Meyeren (Holland) is an emerging writer. Recently she wrote an essay on mourning. At OBRAS she was working on a novel. She took two female characters from two highly successful books, one from the 60th and the other from the 80th. Emma is of the opinion that both books are in essence highly sexist and that the two female characters are severely underexposed. In Emma´s novel the two women meet each other and get an affair.

Ingrid Simons (Holland) was scheduled to have an exhibition in the prestigious Galeria D. Dinis of the Municipal Museum of Estremoz first. Due to Covid it had to be postponed twice, but this year it finally happens. The exhibition ran until 25 June.
  
Ingrid began her career painting church interiors and urban landscapes, and later focused on nature.
When she started her annual residencies at OBRAS in 2010, she adapted her approach. Although she was still seeking what a landscape awakens in her and what makes a landscape sublime, she increasingly felt that the raw nature of Alentejo became a part of her being. She shifted from interpreting nature to experiencing nature: connecting with its pureness and power, and taking time to submerge.  As a result, she now paints more intuitively. Her landscapes have become more abstract in form and colour. Due to this freedom, she has found the richness in cloudy skies, in mirroring water, and in the colours of dusk.
Her fascination with human/nature relationships has manifested in work inspired by artificial lakes in abandoned marble quarries where nature reclaims the manmade space. This subject is shown in a number of paintings and ceramic works in this exhibition.
See this page for info on Ingrid Simons at OBRAS over the past 10(!) years.

Peter van Huffel (Canada, living in Berlin) is saxophone player with a specialty in jazz improvisation. At OBRAS he was mixing his music with sounds of birds, crickets, sheep bells and a poem of Gerry van der Linden. In the Castle of Evoramonte and in an abandoned marble quarry he played with the extreme acoustics. With composer and violinist Aurélie Ferrière he did a wonderful improvisation for his fellow residents.

Gerry van der Linden (Holland) gave an artist talk in the patio of Marmeleira. She showed some small installations of found objects with often a poetic title. And she read some of her recent poems (that differ from earlier ones which generally were the impressions of an observer). In her newer poems her soul is speaking about emotions, fate and age. And they often have a powerful, musical, sometimes rap-like rhythm. Gerry concluded her talk with a hilarious, true short story about the dinner party some days before, with five fellow residents. On their way home they were caught by a police control, who first suspected them of human trafficking and then of violation of various traffic regulations. But later the police team was overwhelmed by the charm and childishness of this strange group of artists.  At the last days of her residency, Gerry started writing a new novel.  

Abby McGuane (Canada) came to OBRAS to work in Portuguese marble. She explored two items: marble objects as carriers of autobiographical meaning and marble being a geological link between Nova Scotia (Canada) and Portugal.
Abby investigates the ways in which notions of power, vulnerability and desire are disclosed and mediated through sculpted shapes. That is why she wished to feel the marble, both in the quarries and during the process of sculpting.  
The marble holds meaning both for the planetary history and within Abby´s personal geography.
Hundreds millions years ago the Americas, Europe and Africa were one supercontinent: Pangaea. Portugal and Nova Scotia shared the same geological structures that later formed marble. 160 million years ago the super-continent into two and most species became extinct. We now live in the Anthropocene and may cause a similar mass extinction. After the end of human existence other life forms may come. What echoes will we leave for these new creatures? Abby contemplates on the possibility that her sculptures may act as a communication device for a world without humans. 
 
Abby spent her youth in Nova Scotia and will soon live there again. After her experience with Portuguese marble, she intends to work with Nova-Scotian marble in the awareness that she is delving into parallel geological histories.

Léon Biezeman (Holland) returned to OBRAS Holland to continue working on his second book for dyslectic children. It is about a kid that very much enjoys his holidays at the grandparents, but he has strange experiences when looking at the newspaper, when picking a box with flower bulbs … These are his first steps in a voyage towards understanding.
Léon is also working on a theater play on dyslexia.

Dan Ayres (UK, living in Berlin) writes short stories and poems, and contributes to June's Journey, a mobile game. Dan pays specific attention to underrepresented communities, including indigenous and LGBTQIA+ characters (he brought the first trans character into the game).
Currently Dan focuses on screenwriting, especially on thoughtful queer storylines. At OBRAS he worked on a comedy-drama called The Fundertakers. It's a subversive exploration of how 'conventional' society deals with death, and how these stifling traditions may be changed (improved?) when viewed through the lens of well-rounded queer characters.
Dan managed to finish to finish the pilot. During his artist talk he presented this work with participation on six fellow residents.

Elizabeth Murray (Ireland) was working on a novel, her first book specifically for adults. It is a dystopian story, set in a hot climate, after an international global warming disaster (she was lucky enough to experience a heatwave of five days, which is very exceptional for June). She decided to make a major shift in the story line, but made sufficient progress to be confident that she will meet the deadline: 15 September, for submitting the manuscript to her agent.  
Elizabeth started every day with an early walk, taking her notebook for the many ideas that pops up during her walk. In between working on her novel, she wrote short stories and poems, and made small drawings. On the occasion of her artist talk she decorated the meeting room with texts, drawings, worksheets and her notebook. It made her artist talk a real reader’s event: see slide show.

---

Connor Power (Ireland) was working on a series of short stories: historical fiction about Irish monks who came to Portugal in the 13th century, to teach the Alentejo monks the techniques of illuminated scripts. Connor´s research showed striking similarities in color and ornamentation. An additional fascination of Connor is the Celtic culture that Ireland and Portugal have in common. In pre-Roman times it probably came from Iberia to Britannia and Ireland. It helped Ireland flourishing up to early medieval times, while in Portugal it was largely (but certainly not completely) lost due to Roman, Visigoth and Arabic ruling.   

Antonio Tavares (Portugal) was working at OBRAS Portugal in the month of March. He felt that he needs the isolation and the big studio to be creative and to work with sizes that he can´t do at home.

Stefano Falcone (Italy) is jazz pianist and composer. During his residency in 2021 he composed nine pieces for piano solo. These were premiered on the Piano Festival in Lecce (September 2021). Stefano was working on a CD that will be released by the end of 2022. It is entitled “OBRAS”. Another resident: Tim Gleason (USA) designed the cover of the CD and some other residents wrote a short text.

Fiona Connor (Ireland) was working on an exhibition that she will get in Monsaraz in 2023. She was making oil paintings and crayon drawings of the nature around OBRAS. She felt a deep connection with the landscapes, the color patterns and the trees. Fiona assumes that is this feeling is due to the thousand´s years of history that this landscape incorporates.  Fiona did the paintings on canvasses and wood panels. The drawings however, were on brown paper backs, not only to make a statement, but also because for her they had the perfect color and structure for crayon.   

Sharon Mertins (Guatemala, living in Berlin) came to work on her first novel. It mixes historical facts on the Guatemalan civil war and related family tragedies with fiction on a love affairs and societal issues. Sharon decided to use a big Guatemalan flower company as a metaphor for what is beautiful and adorable from the outside but cruel and corrupt from the inside. Another prominent item in her novel will become the trap for many expats to romanticize the past.
Partly thanks to another writer-resident: Gerry van der Linden, Sharon decided to start every day with some pages written by hand. This was a revelation to her: it proved to be not only different from computer typing in physical movement and speed, but was also triggering her brains differently.

Ine Lammers (Holland, living in Belgium) is inspired by the Wabi-Sabi philosophy: experience the world with a feeling heart, with intuitive understanding. Only then you recognize the flow of life in yourself, the others and nature, the poetry of existence.
Ine took time to find objects that communicate well with her paintings. She found a lot, in nature on the market and on industrial zones. The seed pods of Brachychiton polulneus, a tree in a residential area of Estremoz, became the dominant object. She made floor mosaics and installations with it.

 Luc van der Velde (Belgium) made a series of land-art installations dedicated to combining natural with artificial materials: a 5 meters high pillar of hay wrapped in plastic, a rubber off print of a tree bark, a 2x4 meters jute tissue covered with local clay, and more. After having installed them in the landscape he invited residents and friends to join for a walk. It was more than just visiting an open-air art exhibition. It also felt like a procession, a celebration, a contemplation on how we see our surroundings.

Michele Caniato (USA) is composer with a musical base in jazz. He was working on a piece for two voices, marimba and saxophone. He let us listen to the rough computer version: it sounded fascinating and promising.
In addition, he was working on Lincoln's Shoes, a comic opera for five characters (soprano, mezzo-soprano, bass-baritone, tenor and baritone). It is a long-term project that is now near to finalisation. The scene for Lincoln's Shoes is in the Abraham Lincoln Home Museum, where a screening for a docu-drama takes place. The problem is that Lincoln’s double doesn’t show up, resulting in lots of confusion. The opera is sung by five characters: soprano, mezzo-soprano, bass-baritone, tenor and baritone.  To get a better idea of the story, Michele let us play (read, not sing) part of the libretto.

THE MIRROR BETWEEN US was an exhibition with an overview of collaborative work of Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco. Luís Branco made highly intriguing photos of Sherry Wiggins in the landscape surrounding the OBRAS Centre. The exhibition closed on 4 June and attracted nearly 4000 visitors. The slide show gives an impression of both the exhibition and the inauguration.
The exhibition contemplated on aging, human-nature relation and beauty. The art work fitted perfectly well in the baroque atmosphere of the S. Vicente church. The opening event on 16 April was highlighted by and impressive, short concert by Andreia Vaz on violin. 
See this page for an impression of the project and links to more background information.

Wilma Geldof (Holland) was working on her third historical novel related to WWII.
The first book was about a boy who was bullied on school because his father had collaborated with the Nazis.
The second was about a girl who was an active resistance fighter when she was 15-17 years old. It took 70 years for to get awarded, because her parents were communist.
The third book will be about girls who were shaved in public because they had been friends with German soldiers. It appeared to be a spontaneous action by angry citizens, but later it turned out that it had been orchestrated by leaders in society.

 Kevin Tolman (USA) made a series of collages and some small paintings.  Kevin is intrigued by the layering of time in surfaces such as walls, billboards and vegetation.  This is especially clear in most of his collages were bits of newspapers or etiquettes are covered with a semi-transparent layer of paint. 

Sara Tolman (USA) always takes elements of her direct surroundings as subjects for her print work, this time being wood prints and linos. With a subtle reference to Alice in Wonderland she created gatherings of a stork, an owl and a hoopoe, all native birds. At the introduction of her artist talk she talked about her family history: for generations it was a family of artists.

In OBRAS Holland, Marike van Dijk worked on a 65 minutes concert for a nine-persons ensemble (two saxophones, trumpet, two drums, bass guitar, contrabass, piano and cello), that will have its grand premiere on the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Holland. The concert is already sold out. We joined the pre-premiere in the BIM huis, in Amsterdam and it was amazing.   
Marike first came to OBRAS Portugal and started working on a very personal project: she was composing a piece (including historical videos), based on the career of her father as an Olympic long-distance ice skater. 

Also at OBRAS Holland, Eva Layla Akiska (actress), Elly Scheele (Writer) and Stephanie van Batum (director), all from Holland, were working on ‘Britney one more time’, an interdisciplinary theatre performance on feminism and misogyny, with Britney Spears as central case.
Britney Spears has been a pop icon since 1998, but hasn't grown into an inspirational role model. She is portrayed by tabloids as superficial, drugs-addicted and weird. She is now 39, but still presents herself on Instagram as a 20-year-old girl.
After some research, Eva, Elly and Stephanie concluded that for the community Britney Spears never became a fully-fledged human being and that she is not seen as a human being that we can have compassion for. They do not want Britney to develop into an independent person with a goal or opinion; they want her to be a girl for as long as possible.
With this in mind Eva, Elly and Stephanie are creating a polyphonic performance (video, music, movement/dance, (partly improvised) texts) about how the world still looks at women and judges them on appearance, likeability and fuckability. The audience will be confronted with how we still do not see women as very human, no matter how "woke" we are.  
The performance will have its premiere next year in Schauspielhaus Bochum (Germany; on 16 July the actresses gave an artist talk as an introduction to their performance) and is planned to be presented also in theaters in Holland and Austria.

Martine de Kok (Belgium) is a multi-media artist. She was drawing, composing music, singing and improvising on the piano. During an excursion to a marble area she was exploring the acoustics of the quarries and recording the sound of her voice. But her main activity was writing a children’s´ book. It tells about birds of all kinds and characters who try to understand the phenomenon of time, and specifically to accept that time goes by. During her artist talk Martine read a part. All were impressed both by the text and her theatrical performance.

OBRAS was closed in July. Already for several years Nico Huijbregts, Peter Bremer, Yvonne Halfens and Nora van Dam come to take care of the house, cats and garden, to enjoy the pool and to work on art. The first three have already a decade long history with OBRAS: as part of the artist’s collective “The Family” they had a group exhibition in 2012 in Évora.
Below is an impression of their artistic activities of this year.

Nico Huijbregts was composing a piece of music for voice and kalimba (finger harp), with a text that was partly drafted by Ludger and Carolien, the managers of OBRAS. The song will be brought to stage in November.

Yvonne Halfens made small constructions of twigs covered with woolen thread. But her main project was making molds for figurines. They will be casted in an aluminum cement mix with in addition parts in ceramic: hands, hear or tears, for instance. These parts will be glazed in “gold”.

Peter Bremer made a series of drawings, paintings and drippings. For some he used plasticized paper with which he got effects that he was very happy with.

Nora van Dam, drama teacher by profession, was working on a story telling project for which she decided to do everything herself: text, direction, design of stage, costumes and attributes, acting, video shooting and editing. She largely finished it during her residency and enjoyed it a lot.

Sherry Wiggins just published her book The Unknown Heroine. It is available on request. An exhibition on this project was in March-April 2021 at Michael Warren Contemporary (Denver, USA).
The Unknown Heroine is a project of performative photography by Sherry (performer) and Luis Branco (photographer), that was partly executed in 2019 in the residence of OBRAS-Holland and partly in 2021 at OBRAS-Portugal. The project will get a continuation in OBRAS-Holland in Ocober 2022.
The images suggest to portray a middle-aged woman who dreams of a grand and compelling life, but is trapped in her role as housewife: she seems to doubt whether this is caused by society or by herself. She lives in a confusing mix of facts and fantasies, of existential wishes and of deep fears.
The project is deeply inspired by the work of Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954), a French feminist and surrealist multi-media artist. In her book Sherry writes a letter to Claude Cahun. Cydney Payton contributed with an essay on the work of Sherry.
See more on the residencies and exhibitions of Sherry Wiggins at OBRAS on this page.   

Also good to know

The ruins of the water mill, a 20 minutes’ walk from our house, may get a second life. Or better: a third life. The second was given by several artists-in-residence, by cleaning the space, using it as scene for photo shoots, performances and cultural happenings. The legal owners popped up and consider it to make it a place that shows its history and honor its surrounding nature. They and we are eager to collaborate.

Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei had the biggest show of his career, and he was doing it in a country he’s fallen in love with: Portugal. The artist ticks off what appeals to him about Portugal: the slow pace of life, very open” people, very acceptable food and abundant sunshine.
Ai arrived in Portugal in 2019 and has no plans to return to Germany or England, where he has also lived since leaving China in 2015. He bought a house near Montemor, 40 kms from OBRAS. “I always make decisions by my personal instinct. I feel comfortable here. Remaining in Portugal was probably the best decision I ever made,” Ai said.
His new exhibition, “Rapture” (11 June until 28 November, in the Cordoaria Nacional in Lisbon) shows 85 pieces including some of his iconic works, as well as new ones produced in Portugal. “Forever Bicycles,” from 2015, a giant sculpture using 960 stainless steel bicycles as building blocks, stands at the entrance to the building. Ai's 16-meter-long (52-foot-long) black inflatable boat with human figures, which alludes to the migration crisis, is also in Lisbon.
Ai has traveled across Portugal visiting craftspeople to learn about using traditional Portuguese materials such as marble, textiles, hand-painted tiles and cork.

We visited the exhibition of Ai Weiwei, and all of a surprise we met him in person (!). And even more of a surprise: he had heard about us and said "being nearly neighbors I should like to come and visit you" (!!) Let us see what the future brings us.

Since 2014 Luís Branco (Portugal) co-operates with Foundation OBRAS. He photographed the work of a number of artists in residence and had collaborative projects. This resulted in exhibitions, videos and a publication. We have created a page on this website to give an impression of the results.

A phase has ended. About 15 minutes from OBRAS is an abandoned train station. It will soon be converted into tourists´ apartments.
The building tells about a history of well over 100 years. Some artists in residence gave it a second live. The past ten years it was the venue of site-specific happenings and photo shoots, and its walls were used for some highly artistic murals. The page on man-made structures in nature gives an impression.