Works | ARCO Lisboa 2026 | THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE

ARCO Lisboa 2026: Group Show: Ana Malta, António Faria, Expanded Eye, Paulo Albuquerque, Pedro Besugo & Vanessa Barragão

Cordoaria Nacional Av. da Índia 1300-598 Lisboa, Portugal, 29 - 31 May 2026

“Embodied Architectures” is a curatorial project that understands architecture in an expanded sense: not merely as built form, but as a symbolic, material, and affective construction that articulates body, territory, memory, and time. 6 artists are brought together whose practices configure a plural architecture, composed of relational systems, where space is simultaneously physical, emotional, narrative.

Painting asserts itself as a structuring device. In Ana Malta’s work, mental landscapes unfold as intimate and unstable territories in which body, memory and time intertwine. Drawing on psychic automatism and primordial marks, her works build emotional cartographies in constant mutation. In Paulo Albuquerque’s practice, painting rises from landscape fragments associated with human-scale cut-outs, establishing a direct relationship between territory and bodily scale, rendering the landscape inhabitable and measured through experience.

Light and drawing, in António Faria’s work, operate as devices of suspension and revelation. His light boxes and monochromatic works evoke the fragility of nature, the erosion of time and human transience. Pedro Besugo approaches drawing as a structure of thought, expanding it into space through maps, plans and grids that articulate geology, architecture, and the city, revealing through installation invisible logics inscribed in the territory.

Ceramics and textiles are conceived as dermis and symbolic architecture. In Expanded Eye’s practice, narrative architectures emerge in which figures and forms float between 2 and 3D; ceramics and sculpture function as contemporary reliquaries, exploring the spiritual and temporal dimensions of human experience. In Vanessa Barragão’s work, textiles combined with ceramics construct organic architectures and regenerative ecosystems, evoking living ruins and possible futures.

Together, the works form a sensitive and stratified architecture, where to build is also to feel, to remember and to inhabit.