margins, cuttings, leaves -
artist residency with Art & Craft Refúgio

Feb - May 2026
Art & Craft Refúgio, Largo Residencias / Jardins do Bombarda, Lisbon

Margins, Cuttings, and Leaves was an artist residency in collaboration with participants of Art & Craft Refúgio, who were invited to revisit their memories and lived experiences through experimentation with materials, using the garden at Jardins do Bombarda as a starting point. Inspired by processes and methodologies found in nature—including mycelium, understood as a metaphor for connection, transformation, and continuity—the residency approached loss not as disappearance, but as a space for renewal and creation. The traces gathered from the environment became a shared language, giving rise to a collaborative work and a series of individual artist's books, in dialogue with the artist's previous works and with the very creative processes that run through the exhibition. Amidst margins, cuttings, and layers of material, the exhibition reveals itself as a living territory of memory, gesture, and continuous transformation and artistic creation. The residency culminated with an exhibition onsite in May 2026. 

ART & CRAFT REFÚGIO is a collective of artists, migrants and people in refugee situations that collaborate in the practice of art and craft. The group comes together weekly to share the collective imaginary and discover new meanings through craft creation and drawing, speaking a common language that is not made of words, but of images and the process of making. Since May 2021, this group of people from various parts of the world have been meeting in Largo Residências, and since 2024, Jardins do Bombarda.

The Garden as Sanctuary -
 residency curatorial
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The garden has long been imagined as a sanctuary: a cultivated space of care, repair, and quiet resistance against instability. Neither fully wild nor entirely controlled, it holds tension between vulnerability and resilience—mirroring the lived experiences of citizens who navigate displacement while cultivating new forms of belonging.

This year's cycle of Art & Craft Refúgio, situated inside Jardins do Bombarda, Lisbon's former psychiatric hospital, draws on the garden as a sanctuary as a metaphor for the selected artists working methodology. As a site of slow labour, shared knowledge, and seasonal cycles, the garden offers a framework for making that prioritises process over product, attentiveness over extraction. Within these workshops, craft practices become acts of tending—stitching, weaving, shaping, and growing—through which participants can reclaim agency, memory, and embodied knowledge often disrupted by migration.

The garden foregrounds questions of access, labour, and ownership, reminding us that sanctuary is always political. By engaging refugees and migrants not as recipients of care but as co-cultivators of space and meaning, the workshops reimagine the garden as a collective commons: a place where artistic practice can foster solidarity, mutual care, and speculative futures rooted in shared ground.
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Collage soup - a root stew, devised in colaboration with participants of Art & Craft Refúgio
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 » Residency workshop in the Estufa provided by A Verdejar, Jardins do Bombarda, Lisbon, March 2026

Collage process,  Feb 2026

Working in the garden, Feb 2026

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