At Drawing Room Lisboa 2026, THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE presents Archipelago, a curatorial project bringing together works by António Faria, Gabriel Garcia and Paulo Albuquerque (Cesáh). The selection brings into dialogue distinct approaches to landscape, memory and the experience of displacement, examining how belonging and subjectivity are shaped across physical, affective and digital geographies.

Bringing together drawing, painting and digital media, the project proposes the archipelago as a conceptual framework through which to consider forms of relation forged across distance, memory and interconnection. Moving beyond a strictly geographical reading, the archipelago emerges as a dynamic structure in which autonomous elements coexist, communicate and generate new meanings. Through distinct visual languages, the three artists explore spaces of transition and states of suspension, reflecting on how we inhabit territories shaped by mobility, instability and the multiplicity of lived experience.

By bringing the three artist's practices into dialogue, Archipelago situates landscape within a field of relations between insular experience, the elaboration of memory and the circulation of images. The non-place in Gabriel Garcia’s work, nature as a temporal inscription in António Faria’s, and the reticular composition of Cesáh’s confer distinct expressions upon the relationship between distance and belonging. The archipelago thus becomes a figure of coexistence: each element retains its singularity, while its relation to the others transforms the conditions through which it is read. Distance itself becomes an integral part of this relational framework, structuring the intervals through which affinities emerge, differences persist and forms of belonging are negotiated.