Competing claims on the landscape

At the centre of her artistic and academic practice is landscape as a space of multiple and competing forms of use, inhabitation and meaning. She explores how landscapes are shaped through different social, economic, ecological and political practices – and how these different approaches become materially embedded in places.

Her research focuses on four interconnected fields of landscape use: agribusiness, tourism, living space and nature conservation. These fields bring together different actors, interests and ways of relating to landscape. They may coexist, overlap and sometimes come into conflict, particularly where they depend on the same land, infrastructures and resources.

Across these different contexts, water is a central connecting theme. Water is at once a material condition of life, an infrastructure of agricultural production, a resource for tourism, part of everyday living environments and an object of environmental protection. Increasing water scarcity makes these different claims visible and turns water into a key site of negotiation and conflict.

The geographical focus of her work is southwestern Portugal, particularly the Alentejo and the municipality of Odemira. Here, intensive irrigated agriculture, tourism, nature conservation and rapidly changing local and migrant communities intersect within the same landscape.

Her research asks how these different ways of accessing, using and producing landscape become visible in infrastructures, everyday practices, material environments and social relations. Rather than understanding landscape as a fixed backdrop, she approaches it as a contact zone in which different forms of knowledge, use and belonging meet.