Contemporânea

Liminal Bodies

Bodies are spaces under construction, permanently subject to both physical and psychic change. Far removed from any supposed normative stability, they are battlegrounds in themselves, responding to the political environment as they are compelled to react to social, cultural, and biological phenomena. In this sense, the plasticity of bodies reveals their ambiguous nature: part human, affective, and intellectual; part organic, perishable, and mortal.

Andreia Santana's work is precisely situated at this threshold, between the volatility of life and the concreteness of matter. For years the artist has been thinking the body—human or otherwise—as a plastic sphere, or as a historical and political platform through which to reflect on the transformations at work within the social fabric. The very notion of the social body seems to function as an amalgam for the ensemble of forces that erupt from her sculptures, perpetually straining the boundaries between public and private. If, on the one hand, her works are constructed within specific linguistic codes and visual tropes, or derive from specific moments anchored in time and collective history, on the other they exacerbate biographical drifts, feelings, and intimate or personal perceptions.

Drawn to two essentially distinct materials—metal and glass—Santana finds in the interstice between resilience and fragility the plastic and conceptual foundation of her sculptures. Early in her artistic career, iron served as a means of drawing forms in space, spreading through the air as though it required that very volatility in order to exist. In Leaves of Absence, presented as part of the Novo Banco Prize in 2016 at the Serralves Contemporary Art Museum, the artist erected steel murals whose transparency was produced through apertures cut into the metal using templates of various archaeological implements: an axe, a rake, a spade, among others. Then, in The Outcast Manufacturers, her first solo exhibition at Galeria Filomena Soares in 2018, she presented a body of three-dimensional works likewise forged in metal, though endowed with an extraordinary lightness: depending on the viewer's position, the sculptures resolve into aerial calligraphies, as mutable as the human perception of any given atmospheric phenomenon—they are, in fact, free drawings inspired by artefacts that have been disregarded or outright banned. Following the same formal register, her subsequent series Rumble Strip, shown at Artworks in 2019, drew on the invisibility of a specific atmospheric phenomenon—sound—to trace the outlines of copper "scores," which find a pole of solidity in the company of sonic objects, a kind of "archaeological" artefacts whose function is seemingly unknown.

Although notions of permeability were already present in Santana's earlier work, it was arguably with the piece displayed at Travessa da Ermida in 2020 that the artist began to expand questions of fluidity and instability in the materials as much as in the themes proposed by her practice. The pivoting sculpture Mist operated as a portal dividing two spaces within the exhibition space, mimicking the building's historic architecture and its arches. Made in bichromated steel, whose iridescent patinas lend lightness to the organic forms within the frame, this site-specific work signals what would later become recurrent in her practice: the construction of spaces situated between immediate reality and imaginative abstraction.

On the Organic, Archaeology, and Transcendence

The search for form, however incomplete, as well as for vestiges of life and history, constitutes a genuine obsession for Andreia Santana. The project Soul Houses, realised at Hangar in 2020 through the exhibition The Skull of the Haunted Snail, was the first of many that would come to incorporate glass as a material essential to the development of the artist's plastic and poetic language. From that point on, metal and glass became constant collaborators in sculptures that simultaneously increase visibility and cloud our vision, stimulating other senses. Extremely tactile, these sculptures (soul houses), inspired by Egyptian artefacts made of clay and placed beside the tombs of humble people so that they might enjoy abundance in eternal life, here bear the names of the artist's closest friends: Pedro, João, Vasco. Made of glass in varying formats, these pieces are given sinuous metallic supports and "pedestals" whose contrast with the transparency of the vessels endows the works with an ambiguous quality, suspended between the terrestrial and the transcendent.

Captivated by the malleable possibilities of glass in its liquid state, Santana would push this material to its limits in producing sculptures made from the remnants of laboratory instruments previously used in scientific research. In the performance-installation Overlapses, Riddles and Spells, staged in 2021 at the CCB in half-light, the collaborating artists Vânia Vaz, António Poppe, and João Polido manipulated enormous rotating crystal masks "contaminated" with residues from their prior use, whether human fluids or chemical elements of the most varied kinds. The near-naked bodies of the performers danced with the sculptural pieces, thereby triggering a new process of contagion through their own sweat and saliva. Biology, technology, and humanity semantically collapse into one another, dissolving the boundaries between what convention has come to call nature and culture.

Second Skins, Armour, and Adornment

The biological body and the technological one have coexisted since prehistory. Skin and second skin would become, in time, skeleton and exoskeleton. While reptiles and arachnids shed their skin in a process called ecdysis, humans exchange their coverings for the most varied purposes: animal hides for protection against the elements, armour for warfare, and fashion as a social shield.

In her exhibition for the EDP New Artists Award held at MAAT in 2022, Andreia Santana constructed an ensemble of structures/shelters in glass and metal, something between an igloo, the crinoline of a woman's gown, and the carcass of a scaled animal hide. Circling these penetrable works, further metallic structures were dispersed throughout the space, bearing delicate glass pieces in the form of an hourglass, a kind of dildo, or a chain of links filled with water—all the glass sculptures, without exception, contained water, or a small metal token, as an index of a time or memory to be preserved. From the near-invisibility, transparency, or immateriality of the installation emerges a feeling of fragility and ambiguity in relation to the forces that operate upon the human body, always exposed to the ensemble of social, cultural, and political phenomena that either imprison or liberate it—violence and pleasure cohabiting in the same social body. Stripped of human presence, this installation demands a haptic relation between visitor and environment. And despite an initial sensation of coldness, given the materials chosen by the artist, what persists is the feeling of profound human vulnerability, in its physicality as much as in its emotionality.

Yet if the domes of Skin Echoes help us consider the body from an external and an internal perspective at once—as architectural protection on the one hand, and as a fashion or fast-fashion (prêt-à-porter in French) accessory on the other—in both cases Santana addresses the successive physical and semiotic structures that have forged the human body since time immemorial. What are the symbolic and material spheres within which we humans cohabit? And to what extent can we dispense with any of them in order to make sense of our existence, whether in the domain of affective transcendence or of immanent mortality?

Totems of Desire

In Eros and Errors, the artist's solo exhibition at Galeria das Índias in 2024, we find ourselves once more before a tacit labyrinth, moving among ghost-structures and crossing diaphanous thresholds between our physicality and our desire. There is something Spinozian in Santana's art: rather than deriving from dualisms of body and mind (or soul), it demands, on the contrary, a fusion of the mundaneness of the body and the ethereal register of human emotions, both sharing a single space or atmosphere—each engendering the other, at risk of mutual cancellation should one attempt to escape the holism intrinsic to one’s existence.

Having lived part of the year in New York since receiving a Fulbright grant in 2021, Santana began investigating the metal scaffolding structures that clad the city's buildings as exoskeletons. Yet in covering the façades, these structures inadvertently create a space of protection for the city's human contingent. Between the rationality of the civic apparatus, the intricacies of human ingenuity, and the latency of desire, however, such structures take on renewed purposes in everyday life. Wandering through New York, the artist came to notice that beyond its hard surface, the scaffolding (or exoskeleton) offered refuge to those who, in the shadows of the night, beneath its metal grid, wished to give free rein to more worldly drives in physical, sensual, and sexual encounters with other bodies.

But when night finally yields to daylight, not all cats are grey. And so Eros and Errors is built from portals of metal and glass that conceal and disclose narratives possibly forged in each visitor’s intimate memory. As nourishment for such fantasies, scattered across the gallery are sculptures that emulate the material spoils accompanying human ordeals and misdemeanours and transgression: key-sculptures, dildo-sculptures, toy-sculptures dispersed throughout the exhibition space like a vast lost-and-found, poetically reenacting the objects the artist encountered beneath the New York scaffolding at break of day.

In abandoning hierarchies between bodies and architecture, the artist seems to cultivate a reversed gaze upon humans and works of art: who is looking at whom? Under the scrutiny of her sculptures, all of us have something to conceal, but also to reveal. This apparent game of hide-and-seek ends up leaving us bare, without any shields to protect us. The translucent glass, marked by diffuse organic forms, yields clues of a residual human history in the process of migrating from the private to the collective sphere. We are one, and we are many; an individual, a people, a shared humanity, for all the considerable social, cultural, and economic differences. I would even dare say that there is something universal in the work of Andreia Santana, universalising in its iconoclastic, fetishistic fury, indiscriminately so.

Perspectives and Vanishing Points

Invited for a residency at Oakville Galleries, near Toronto, in 2025, Santana pursued her research into visibility and invisibility through new phenomenological arrangements. This time, rather than occupying institutional space with works developed a priori, the architecture of the institution itself—a mansion with numerous large windows giving onto Lake Ontario—would provide the formal and conceptual framework for her new project. In intimate dialogue with the sitting rooms and bay windows of the house-cum-exhibition-space, the artist’s site-specific installation proposes a mise-en-abyme perceptual drift, once again casting the viewer into a labyrinthine play of mirrors: openings and their frames are repeated within the mansion's interior, opening new passages from the architectural interior to the exterior landscape and back again, reversely, to the visitor and their body. In a procedure that evokes the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, only in movement are we capable of perceiving the dynamic nature of the artist's installation, as well as of the world surrounding it. As he writes: " The world is not what I think, but what I live; I am open to the world, I unquestionably communicate with it, but I do not possess it, it is inexhaustible."1

In suspending aluminium frames covered with mosquito-screen mesh at various points throughout the rooms, as though they were actual windows, Santana creates fissures and opens up passages and perspectives that reconfigure the original architecture with the aim of breaching the boundaries of its mute white walls, as well as the arbitrary framing of the exterior landscape. The screens, however, acquire drawings of their own, cut into their surface as geometric forms whose bronze and aluminium outlines are filled with glass—glass that is nonetheless denied the transparency which would guarantee the viewer absolute visibility. Depending on the viewer’s position, overlapping layers of art and architecture corrupt the landscape and create vanishing points from the interior world to the exterior one, and back. As for the motifs of the drawings on the screens, they were inspired by the work of Ron Baird, a local artist and architect responsible for designing the gates of the Centennial Building in Oakville. This procedure reiterates the artist's appropriative gesture in relation to the exhibition space as much as to its cultural surroundings—for in Santana's work, experience and materiality occupy the same semantic and artistic plane

The Immediate Body: Transparent Fashion

In her most recent projects, namely Brix at Galeria Filomena Soares and Cosmocópula at CAV, both in 2025, Andreia Santana returned to mesh as the articulating element of her works. Where previously it served as a textile weave capable of clouding the conditions of visibility over the landscape, she now uses metallic mesh to propose precisely the inverse: by constructing garments from this material, framed in aluminium, the artist breaks with one of the primordial functions of human clothing—that of concealing the body. Rather than exposing it beneath the transparent mesh, however, the works propose something of a different order: the unveiling of the codes implicit to dress within their sociocultural contexts. We thus encounter jackets, tights, corsets, and underwear, items that throughout history have served to reinforce perceptions of gender or, on the contrary, to dissolve them, as in the case of jeans, for instance.

The series of wall sculptures that stylise and distil the forms of particular garments operates as a taxonomic exercise in Western fashion and its normative drive to distinguish between the feminine and the masculine. This whole endeavour grows more complex, however, insofar as the pieces do not represent the individual who wears the garments; and in suppressing the identity of whoever is dressed, Santana's works reinforce the arbitrary character of fashion. As such gender distinctions get circumvented, we are confronted with the abstraction underlying the normative concepts imposed by clothing, which ultimately renders the wall works abstract exercises in image-construction—something further reinforced by the artist's nude self-portraits, the only works to present the human body, though it remains somewhat veiled by the weave of the mesh screens interposed as filters for the images.

In a further discursive register, Santana “conceals” small sweets made of coloured glass—in an appropriative gesture referencing the work of Félix González-Torres—inside the pockets of several of the metallic-mesh garments. Alluding to the works of the Cuban gay artist who presented mounds of coloured sweets as an allegorical measure of the number of lives claimed by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, she reinforces the political character of the exhibition, pursuing a revision of consolidated notions of gender within predominantly Western cultures. In this sense, an individual's body and their sexual practices become a matter of personal and biographical order, in contradistinction to the notion that intimate life ought to be subject to public scrutiny. The sweet, therefore, functions as a touchstone through which a given person's fantasies and memories may be kept intact and protected from the public sphere, which assails citizens whenever it insists on turning into an object of public inquisition that which properly belongs to the private.

Throughout Andreia Santana's body of work, the works frequently insinuate themselves as protective artefacts, shelter-structures, or even hiding places for the human being as much as their most intimate drives and fantasies. In creating sculptures that cut across the recesses of the imagination and the hypervisibility of the material world, the artist questions our notions of freedom and confinement, pleasure and violence, reality and fiction. Whenever we believe ourselves to have access to a given thing, whether an object or an image, Santana seems to relocate it elsewhere, beyond our immediate comprehension and reach. It is as though absolute visibility had the power to blind us all.

Andreia Santana