Ana Sousa Santos (b. 1994), Portuguese visual artist, holds a degree in Fine Arts – Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (2012–2016), with complementary training in Ceramics and Human Figure Modeling at the Facultat de Belles Arts de Barcelona (2015). In 2025, she completed her Master’s in Art and Design for Public Space (MADEP) at FBAUP, where she deepened her research centered on the relationships between body, territory, and ecology under the theme “Absent, Suggested and Camouflaged Body: from the Multisensory Universe to the Search for Lack.”
Her artistic practice is built upon research into the body as matter, surface of inscription, and relational device. Working between sculpture, ceramics, performance, drawing, and installation, she explores processes of modeling, molding, and printing as ways of thinking about presence through absence, making Lack an operative condition. The absence of the body—suggested, camouflaged, or fragmented—becomes a field of sensory and symbolic activation, invoking an experience of cohabitation, vulnerability, and ecological awareness.
Her work articulates around four conceptual axes: Negatives, Senses, Membrane, and Camouflage. In Negatives, she investigates the body through its residual mark—bas-reliefs and high reliefs, molds, fragments, and impressions that record the contact between skin, matter, and surface, functioning as sensitive archives that reveal unfinished processes. In Senses, she explores experiences of sensory deprivation, perceptive displacement, and bodily attention in the environment, proposing situations where the body is led to listen, touch, or feel in an amplified way. Membrane emerges as both metaphor and formal structure: organic, porous, and permeable surfaces that mediate relations between interior and exterior, human and non-human, visible and invisible. Camouflage runs through much of her performative production, placing the body in processes of hybridization with space, territory, and materials, dissolving identity boundaries and questioning the limits of presence.
Her methodology is based on creating interactive sculptural objects and devices, many of them designed to be activated by the body in performances, actions in public space, or site-specific installations. These are not sculptures as static forms, but rather open, unstable, and relational structures: mediating membranes. The body frequently appears camouflaged, making the performative action a gesture of listening and exposure to individual and collective fragility.
Over the past two years, this research has been consolidated in different geographical and cultural contexts, including Finland, Latvia, Turkey, and Italy, within international programs and interdisciplinary collaborations. During her participation in the “YES Program,” a European sculpture project, she performed “Into the forest” (2025) in Kuldiga, Latvia, exploring the absence of vision as a starting point for a multisensory reconnection between body and landscape. In a studio context, she developed “Wearing the ephemeral – second skin” (2025), in which the body becomes a support for vegetable sprouts, establishing a symbiotic fusion between human and plant world. This project evolved into the performance “Hybrid Body. Act of wearing and removing the ephemeral” (2025), activated in forest spaces and centered on camouflage as a gesture of transformation, coexistence, and gift-giving, which also resulted in a photographic series “Choreographies of Coexistence” (2025), created in collaboration with artist Heper Sayar and exhibited at Akbank Sanat in Istanbul.
Other notable projects include “Archive of Impressions,” exhibited at the Gaia Biennial (2017); the solo exhibition “The body drags on raw fabric” (2018) at the Centro de Memória of Vila do Conde; “Identity Essays | Behind the Canvas,” exhibited at the Cerveira Biennial 2020, a set of body fragments on inverted canvases that problematized the artist’s identity construction from what precedes the final work; “Wild Hive” (2024), awarded the Young Artisan Prize of Vila do Conde; “Sowing Freedom” (2024), awarded second place in the National Crafts Fair Prize competition; and “Fragile Ocean” (2025), a ceramic piece inspired by coral reefs, an ode to the delicacy of marine ecosystems and the fragility of their existence.
Ana Sousa Santos’s work establishes itself as a contemporary practice that explores body and environment, assuming Lack as a fertile condition for creation. Between presence and absence, matter and gesture, she proposes experiences that destabilize perceptive and sensory boundaries, activating reconnections between living beings and territory, functioning as a catalyst for attention, care, and interdependence, and installing spaces of vulnerability where art becomes an instrument of awareness, cohabitation, and shared transformation.
Exhibitions and artistic curriculum
PERCURSO NAS ARTES PLÁSTICAS CONTEMPORÂNEAS (PT)
Exposições Individuais (I) e Coletivas:
(C) 2013 – Exposição coletiva do 1º ano – Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto, Porto
(C) 2014 – Exposição PAUSA – Edifício AXA, Aliados, com “Mulher grávida” [30x30x70cm; figura humana com fios elétricos vermelhos envolvendo o corpo]
(C) 2014 – Exposição INATEL 2014, com “Dobrar de Roupa” [40x50x60cm, caixa de madeira, calças de ganga de gesso]
(I) 2016 – Exposição Individual “A Parte com o Todo” – Espaço Cultura, Braga [esculturas de figuras humanas esboçadas, 30x20x20cm, gesso e cerâmica]
(C) 2016 – Exposição Coletiva “Reverter” – FAJDP com Ricardo Pinho [projeção de dois videos, projeto do 4º ano de licenciatura]
(C) 2016 – Exposição final de Licenciatura “Todos os Títulos” – Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto [projeção de video, instalação e textos de autor]
(C) 2016 – Exposição “Projeções 2016/O Desenho da Fbaup” – Lugar do Desenho, Fundação Júlio Resende, Porto [“Impressões de partes do corpo”, 16 elementos, 10x15cm cada, papel e beterraba diluída]
(C) 2017 – Exposição Coletiva com Ângelo Ribeiro, Guilherme Fonseca, João Macedo e Moisés Tomé –
Museu Municipal Pe. José Rafael Rodrigues, intitulada “Da pedra, bronze e afins” [cinco esculturas de figuras [humanas, 40x60x90cm cada, cerâmica e gesso]
(C) 2017 – Exposição Coletiva “Branco não é cor”, com João Baptista e Eva Couteiro – Espaço Cultura [cinco esculturas de figuras humanas, 30x20x40cm cada, gesso]
(C) 2017 – Bienal de Gaia 2017 – com “Arquivo de Impressões” [caixa de madeira, com 16 compartimentos, 90x20x160cm, cera de abelha, papel e beterraba diluída]
(I) 2017 – Exposição Individual “O Corpo Arrasta-se no Tecido Cru” – Centro de Memória de Vila do Conde [conjunto de experiências de impressões do corpo em diversos suportes, papel, tela, café, açafrão e beterraba]
(C) 2019 – Jovem Criador Aveiro – Video “Arquivo de Impressões” [projeção do video, 22:41’]
(I) 2020 – Exposição “Esboços do Corpo” – Casa da Cultura de Paredes [conjunto de esculturas de figuras humanas, gesso, cerâmica]
(C) 2020 – Bienal de Cerveira, com “Ensaios de identidade |Por detrás da tela (15×15)(2)” [90x90x3cm, telas, gesso e grafite]
(I) 2021 – Exposição “Esboços do Corpo” – Casa da Cultura de Coimbra [conjunto de esculturas de figuras humanas, gesso, cerâmica]
(I) 2021 – Exposição “Esboços do Corpo” – Biblioteca Municipal Rocha Peixoto [conjunto de esculturas de figuras humanas, gesso, cerâmica]
(I) 2022 – Exposição “Esboços do Corpo” – Casa da Cultura de Estarreja [conjunto de esculturas de figuras humanas, gesso, cerâmica]
(I) 2023 – Exposição “Esboços do corpo” – Casa da cultura em Vila Franca de Xira e na Casa [conjunto de esculturas de figuras humanas, gesso, cerâmica]
(C) 2023 – Festival “Vamos ver onde isto vai dar”, em Aveiro, com performance “Fragmentos de cerâmicas sensoriais”; com “Arquivo de impressões” e o video “Tingimento”.
(C) 2024 – Exposição “Fora da Caixa”, com “Manto de Castas de Árvores” – Galeria Cozinha, na Faculdade de Belas Artes do Porto. [50 x 40 x 90cm; cerâmica, fio e tecido de sisal]
(I) 2024 – Performance “Vestígios Soltos” – LINKKI Helsínquia, Finlândia
(I) 2024 – Video e escultura “Into the Forest”, com “Dispositivo para facilitar o ver e o sentir” e “Portal Intemporal”– Yes Program em Kuldiga, Letónia [ “Portal Intemporal”, 2x2x2m, madeira, folhas e cola]
(C) 2024 – Festival “Art Alive”, em Aveiro, com performance “Camuflagem”, com a obra “Manto de Cascas de Árvores”
(C) 2024-2025 – Exposição “Mais do que casas”, no MUDE, com a performance “Camuflagem”, com a escultura “Manto de Cascas de Árvores”.
(C) 2025 – Festival Art ALIVE, em Aveiro, com a performance “Diálogo entre membranas”, com o “Biombo Sensorial”.
(C) 2025 – Exposição de projetos realizados durante o YES Program, em Carrara, Itália, com “Postcard from Carrara – Transparencies between mountains and valleys”.
(I) 2025 – Exposição “Membranas para conectar”, realizado na Galeria Cozinha, FBAUP, com curadoria de Heper Sayar.
(C) 2025 – Projeto fotográfico “Choreographies of Coexistence”, em parceria com Heper Sayar, no Akbank Sanat, em Istambul
(C) 2025 – Exposição coletiva “Enquanto isso…”, Museu, Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto
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PERCURSO ARTESANATO CONTEMPORÂNEO:
FEIRAS E EXPOSIÇÕES
FIA – Feira Internacional de Artesanato, Lisboa (2023)
Feira de Artesanato de Vila do Conde (2023)
Viagem Medieval de Santa Maria da Feira (2023)
Mercado de Natal de Natal do Porto (2023)
Feira de Artesanato de Vila do Conde (2024)
Fatacil, Algarve (2024)
Exposição coletiva – “Saber Fazer Abril Sempre”, Museu Berardo em Estremoz (2024),
com a obra “Semear a Liberdade” (2024)
Mercadinho no Festival ART ALIVE, Aveiro (2025)
FIA – Feira Internacional de Artesanato, Lisboa (2025) – Obras a concurso: “Recife de coral” (2025) na categoria artesanato contemporêneo; “Memória azul no corpo do vaso” (2025) na categoria artesanato tradicional.
Feira de Artesanato de Vila do Conde (2025)
Exposição coletiva – “Saber Fazer Abril Sempre”, Casa da Ribeira, Viseu (2025), com a obra “Semear a Liberdade” (2024)
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PRÉMIOS E MENÇÕES HONROSAS:
Menção Honrosa, Fundação INATEL 2014, com a escultura “Dobrar de Roupa”
Prémio INTERICYCLING 2014 como a obra “Mulher Grávida”
Prémio Jovem Artesão, Vila do Conde, com a escultura “Colmeia Selvagem”, 2024
Prémio Feira Nacional de Artesanato, Vila do Conde, (2.º lugar) com a obra “Semear a Liberdade”, 2024
Prémio Feira Nacional de Artesanato, Vila do Conde, com a obra “Oceano Frágil”, 2025