This page shows residents and their projects in 2025.
Recent residences are in the newsletter.
Other pages show residents and their projects in 2024, 2023, 2022, 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 2025. The most recent are in the newsletter.

Elisabete Marques (Portugal) split her residency into two: two weeks in April and two in August. This is related to her subject; she is making poems about natural vegetation, and especially about plant species that are assumed to be weeds. She intends to investigate two seasons.
Elisabete choose esteva (Cystus ladanifer; a picture is in the heading of this page) as her focal point: a shrub with a spicy scent and with fragile white flowers with a red dot on each petal. In April the flowers turn complete valleys white as if it had snowed. Urban people highly appreciate this phenomenon, but farmers and shepherds hate esteva.
Elisabete is chief editor of Skheme, an online interarts magazine. She interviewed several OBRAS residents for an article, and Linda Buckmaster will get one of her poems published.  

Linda Buckmaster (USA) came to work on a new novel. But she found so much inspiration for new poems that she decided to postpone the novel. Linda finished four poems and was working on another eight. As a side-project she collected some forty slabs of slate and marble, wrote a few poetic words on each, and hide them in the nature around the house.
Another side-project was a collaboration with Kimmo Ylõnen. This will be shown in an update of this newsletter.
In her artist talk, Linda paid attention to her recent exhibition on the history of cod fish, which relates New Foundland with Portugal (see also Linda on cod communities.     

Leon Biezeman (Holland)  came to work on a novel, a love story with blurring time lines and some autobiographical elements. Leon is dyslectic. Already for thirty years he is writing for dyslectic children; he published some six books.
During his artist talk he gave an overview of what is known about dyslexia and about his personal journey, starting from his early youth where he discovered that he was eager to read but just could not, until the present in which he is writing a novel.

Antonio Tavares was working at OBRAS in March. Four years ago, he met two residents at OBRAS: Anna Maria Achatz and Elisabeth Melkonyan, who run a beautiful art gallery in Innsbrug. They selected Antonio for an exhibition that took place from 18 March until 12 April in Galerie Nothburga.  He showed new work that was largely created at OBRAS. His next exhibition is in June this year in Badajoz (Spain).   

“I didn’t want to quote Jean-Luc. But Godard’s opposition of art and culture is at stake. Culture follows some rules, the caring rules of agriculture. Art can step out of line. Art is able not to care. What if we have the physical need to do it, to step out of line?”
 
As part of the Open Studio on 31 May, Giuseppe de Salvatore did a try out for an improvised performance: Tremens. It is part of a project in which Giuseppe is working on a book about vagueness. The video recording by Ruth Baettig has been an unplanned, spontaneous deed (https://the-artificial.org/).

Kimmo Ylönen (Finland) came to build an openly political and activist work of art. It is a multidisciplinary project that investigates the assumption that there truly is a mindset and a set of values that most Europeans share (the Treaty of Lisbon, (2009) suggests so, but may be wishful thinking). He was preparing his cycling tour home (4800 km!) that brings him along historical sites where countries decided or forced to divide the world into spheres of influence (e.g. Tordesillas (1491) and Verdun (1916)). The cycle tour will give him a glance of differences and similarities of identities of nations. His investigation will result in an exhibition.
A long-term side-project of Kimmo is to build a waterwheel on all sites where he has a residency. The idea is that people who see the wheel running are getting more aware of how precious water is. His waterwheel for the Ribeira São Braz got an extra dimension by the words that the poet Linda Buckmaster wrote on each of the paddles.

Larry Feign (USA, Hongkong, Portugal) was working a second historical novel about Shek Yang (1775–1844), a remarkable woman who rose from poverty to pirate royalty in southern China. Still being a child, her father sold her to a floating brothel. At an age of 26 she bought her freedom, only to be kidnapped and forced to marry a pirate gang leader. Due to her intelligence and leadership qualities, she brought competing pirate fleets together and defeated English, Portuguese, Dutch and Chinese armadas. She was also a skilled negotiator and strategist. She guided her community from piracy to a life of traders and owners of gambling houses.   
Larry is novelist, but may be even more a historian. He worked with proven facts and debunked many myths. The way he analysed and combined information, and his attention for details impressed his fellow residents deeply.
During his residency he analysed information about the life on flower boats. It proved that there was much cultural entertainment, rather than just selling sexual services. Larry found the scores of a flower boat song and during his artist talk Beate Schnaithmann played it on cello.    

Martine de Kok (Belgium) is a multimedia artist. During her residencies in 2022, 2023 and 2024 she was writing, drawing and composing songs, all for a children’s book (with a QR code to her songs) about TIME. It was just published (in Dutch): see this link. The book tells the great adventure of little bird Robin who doesn’t understand anything about TIME. She goes to ask advice from other birds in the forest, hoping to find something with which she can stop or slow down time.
Martine wrote the following teaser: “Robin has no time to work on her essay about ‘time’. In a few days she will be ten, and she has to prepare a party. To gain time, she asks the other birds in the forest for advice. Does time really fly forward, as the old, wise Eagle claims? Does Owl, the poet who has never finished a poem, know more? And why does carrier pigeon Dave go round in circles while he talks about time? It is the beginning of a breathtaking adventure, in which Robin gets lost in the dark coniferous forest, and a storm blows her into the lap of a gang of bizarre birds. Will Robin find what she is looking for?”

James Bell made Catharsis: a 15-minute video exploring his experience of grief, whilst being in various landscapes. A 2.30 minutes extract is on YouTube. The music is from composer-singer Sophie Tassignon (see 2022 and 2024 for info on her residencies).
Recently, James has moved to Portugal. 

Dan Ayers (UK, living in Berlin) was working a film script in six episodes on Molly houses: bars for quer people. In the 18th century London, there were more molly houses than there are gay bars nowadays. The story mixes two story lines: one in the 18th century and another in the present.
A gay Londoner escapes his own (hetero) wedding and stumbles through a secret passage from the 21th to the 18th century. He meets quer people in a Molly house and falls into a romantic affair. But his lover is taken by the authorities. Now he is involved in two fights in two very different Londons, but both are an attempt run away from conformity and to become his true self.
During his artist talk, Dan invited his fellow residents to play a role in his story. It was enlightening and fun in the same time. Dan also talked about his experience in the tough acquisition process for selling film script.

Sharon Bishop (UK) is deeply inspired by Rothko, especially by his paintings of three stacked color planes. She used that concept, but gave her personal touch: by adding tiny line drawings of buildings and by using local materials, either for painting (marble dust, red clay) or for printing (cork and wood). At her presentation she read her artist’s statement from a marble sheet.  

Alëna Korolëva (Russia, living in Canada) is a sound artist with a special interest in ecology. In 2022 she had a residency during which she recorded (among others) the sounds in an abandoned marble quarry.  In the past years she composed, published and exhibited soundscapes of these recordings. The latest one was released in March as a part of 14 Soundscapes compilation on Biodiversità Records . Alëna introduced this soundscape with the following text:
“The Borba region of Portugal, known for its rich marble deposits, is dotted with over 400 pit mines, all but 50 are abandoned. In 2018, a massive collapse in one of the largest quarries claimed five lives in a landslide. The history of mining is etched into the landscape, visible in the deep scars left by extraction. Over time, these wounds have been reclaimed by nature as non-human species adapt to the ruins, turning them into homes.
Four years after the landslide, I found myself at the bottom of this quarry as the sunset. Above me, pigeons circled the lower levels, filling the air with the continuous whistle of wings, while starlings gathered near the mouth of the pit, 50 meters above.
This colony of starlings had a few tunes they repeated again and again. The sounds reminded me of sirens and the beeping of excavation machinery from the nearby quarries. Masters of acoustic mimicry, the starlings took these simple melodies and created variations on the same notes, not just repeating but unfolding new songs, their regional dialect.”