um proposição têxtil entre o tempo e o espaço
a textile proposition between time and space
07.06.2025 - 10.08.2025 - atelier b12, lisbon - portugal

Solo exhibition by Rafaela Salgueiro with an activation by Julia Ribeiro

In Rafaela Salgueiro’s practice, textile is no longer a noun — it becomes a verb: to stitch, to activate, to question, to care. Her sculptural works — amorphous, expansive, fluid, and sometimes unsettling — resist fixed definitions. They do not invite passive contemplation, but rather demand engagement. To touch, to wear, to respond.

Textile here is not just material: it is language, gesture, and political proposition. Salgueiro constructs forms that exist beyond categories of function or gender, inviting the viewer to participate — not merely observe. Her works, often monumental in scale, dwarf the human body, provoking a shift in perspective and challenging hierarchies between object and subject, art and audience.

This exhibition unfolds as a space of shared activation, where touch and interaction are key. It is rooted in feminist and collective thinking, proposing a sensorial language for resistance and connection.

As part of the exhibition’s closing event, at the finissage, artist Julia Ribeiro leads a fermentation workshop inspired by Fermenting Feminism and the vegetal philosophy of Emanuele Coccia — a shared practice of embodied, collective transformation, using tucupi — a fermented Amazonian ingredient — as a starting point for a conversation around food, care, and transformation. Ribeiro, like Salgueiro, centers the body and collaboration in her practice, using cooking as a tool for feminist fermentation and radical collectivity.

Both artists approach the body and the senses as tools for transformation. Salgueiro works through textiles; Ribeiro through food. In both, the spectator becomes an active participant, engaging not only visually, but through smell, touch, and taste. These are works that invite us to relate — to art, to each other, and to the world — through shared processes of making and becoming.

In ‘A textile proposition between time and space’, art is not something to be admired from a distance. It is something to be lived, felt, transformed — a soft and powerful space where the political becomes palpable, and the collective becomes possible.

text in portuguese
text in french
images from the fermentation workshop held on july 18, 2025. inspired by the text Fermenting Feminism by Lauren Fornier and the vegetal philosophy of Emanuele Coccia, activated by artist Julia Ribeiro. all images by Julia Sarturi.