Interview with João Marques, author of the Umbigo.space cover

article

DATE

20 Apr 2026

AUTHOR

Laurinda Branquinho

Interview with João Marques, author of the Umbigo.space cover

AUTHOR

Laurinda Branquinho

João Marques’s practice stems from a direct relationship with the land. This conversation explores a body of work shaped by the place where he grew up, through experiences of loss and the acts of gathering that underpin his creative process. The artist articulates a reflection on territory, identity, and collective responsibility, proposing a reversal of perspective: instead of seeking answers in the sky, he invites us to stop and look at what lies beneath our feet—the earth.

Laurinda Branquinho: Your process involves collecting soil and debris left behind by fires. How did you come to this place, and what interests you or what are you looking for?

João Marques: Yes, the land, the material world, is, in general, my work’s foundation. It is always present. I believe that the places we inhabit shape us profoundly. José Mattoso wrote about this subject; he believed that the places humans inhabit shape them, and that humans ultimately shape the territory as well, as if in a symbiotic process. I was lucky enough to grow up in a place—I say “place” because it isn’t even a village or a town—that is relatively remote, in the far north of the Leiria district, in the municipality of Alvaiázere. I think of that place as a Garden of Eden, Mediterranean in nature. A mountain range dotted with oak, holm oak, and millennia-old olive trees—enormous, absolutely beautiful. One of the few places I know in our country that remains largely untouched by humans. There are a few houses, the occasional road, some small stone walls, and nothing else. It is a paradise, sacred to me.

My connection with nature and the earth, a certain sensitivity and inclination to pay attention to what happens to them—I believe that comes from there, from that direct contact with an environment like that.

In 2022, during a very hot summer, almost everything was consumed by a massive wildfire. It raged for seven days and swept through all the places that were dear to me: the house where I grew up, my grandparents’ homes, my father’s house, and the school I attended through elementary school. Those were endless days. Every day, a place I held dear was at risk of burning down. Although the mountain range where the house I grew up is located is surrounded by oak and holm oak trees, just a few kilometers away, the landscape changed completely, and the hundreds of small plots of land owned by local farmers below the mountains were filled with eucalyptus and pine trees. The fire spread rapidly from Ourém, and the eucalyptus forests provided enough fuel to completely devastate my parish (about 90% of the area burned). I had already seen, from a distance, the 2017 fires in Pedrogão Grande and the 2018 fires that decimated the Pinhal de Leiria, but they were relatively far from me. After the flames spread to neighboring towns, all that remained were the ashes and the charred, blackened tree trunks. The entire landscape was completely black for several months. On top of that, in January of the following year, something happened in my life that shook me to the core. I found myself in a very, very dark place and was unable to work for a while.

Ironically, an opportunity arose to exhibit at the Museum of Natural History and Science in early 2024, in what would become my first solo exhibition. I wasn’t quite sure what to do; I suggested showing some pieces I’d already finished, but I didn’t like them at all. It all seemed meaningless to me. Then the idea for an installation came to me, when I didn’t know what to do. I was still very frustrated and angry about everything I had gone through in the past two years. I had never done an installation before, or any other work on such a large scale, but at the time, for me, everything was very raw. Sofia Marçal, who curated the exhibition titled Divina Terra (Divine Earth), was excellent because she gave me permission to do whatever I wanted. It was a sort of everything-to-nothing. I started seeing art this way from then on. It has to be a matter of life or death, and it’s either created with the intention of changing something—even if that’s just the simple, beautiful act of sparking thought—or it’s not worth it. I’ve always been very idealistic, and I still am despite everything, so that’s the driving force behind my creation. Trying to change the world.

LB: I see in your pieces an intention to give the earth a different status, almost like a relic or a monument. You lift the earth off the ground, arrange it vertically, parallel to our bodies, and add focal points of light. Could you tell us about this approach?

JM: My idea is, precisely, to create this symbolic gesture of lifting the ground. To make the viewer confront the earth—all that matter I have captured—which, beyond its physical qualities, has a specific history. My artistic practice is deeply rooted in the desire to pay attention to what lies beneath, to that ground, that Earth that supports and sustains us. Generally speaking, in Western culture, we look for answers above and hope to reach Heaven. In the collective imagination, this is certainly a place imagined to be better, more luminous. I was interested in doing exactly the opposite: thinking about what lies below and seeking answers—any kind of enlightenment—there. Lifting the ground and placing it on a plane we are not normally accustomed to seeing it—facing the viewer—stems precisely from this intention to make it visible, almost by force. Choosing to use only this earth as a medium, without any kind of figuration, written word, or code, is a statement. It is very direct, and the qualities of the material speak for themselves. The choice of lighting is crucial to highlighting these qualities—the textures, the shadows, the volumes that stand out. The idea is also to create a relatively dark environment that allows the viewer to feel “inside” something, immersed in all this material.

LB: Is the soil you use in the installation Neste país sem olhos e sem boca from somewhere close to you?

JM: Yes. When I first showed this installation, in 2024 at the Museum of Natural History and Science, all the soil came from a plot of land next to my maternal grandparents’ house. The act of walking over to the site of the fire and collecting the soil is also very important to my artistic process. The soil—which has been burned—is collected with great care. I’m not interested in digging large holes or having any negative impact on the environment, so I scrape away the topmost layers of soil, which, having burned recently, is very dark and full of charred matter—twigs, stones, leaves, roots—and I do so at intervals, so as not to remove all the material which also serves to fertilize the soil. This takes me many hours to do. It is a solitary process. That first moment was very personal because I collected the soil from a place that was very dear to me, where I often played. Later, to fill the room that was given to me at the National Museum of Archaeology in Malta, I had to double the size of the installation. In the past two years, since the fires at my home, the soil has already regenerated somewhat. So, I had to collect burnt soil from other places. Some came from a eucalyptus forest in Pedrogão Grande, some from Albergaria-a-Velha. The fact that the installation incorporated material from different territories pleased me greatly.

LB: I love the title's poetic quality. Where did it come from, and what does it mean to you?

JM: The title of the work is taken from the first and last lines of a poem by Ruy Belo titled Portugal Sacro-Profano - Lugar onde). This poem means the world to me. In 2023, while discovering this phenomenal poet, I became so captivated that I didn’t rest until I had gathered all of his poetry collections. I felt a deep connection not only to him, but especially to this poem. It has an aura that closely mirrors the state of mind I was in before and during the creation of this work. I was completely immersed, in a good way, in Ruy Belo’s poetry, and the truth is that I couldn’t find a title that better expressed the idea behind this work than this verse. This work, as I said, was born out of a series of irritations and personal frustrations, and this poem—and this verse in particular—expresses precisely that. A country's inaction—which doesn't actually have to be a specific country, just a commonplace—that pretends not to see and perhaps, deep down, wants to change, but never does. That allows itself, every year and so needlessly, to burn, to self-destruct for so little.

LB :Let’s back up a bit. As you mentioned, in Western culture we often look to the heavens in search of answers. Is looking down and focusing on the earth a way of facing the answers we already have within us?

JM: Yes, at least an attempt to find them. For a long time, humanity has been heading in the opposite direction. It has viewed the earth and nature merely as fuel for a technological drive whose concept of progress, it seems to me, is based on false premises. When human beings were placed philosophically and (theologically) at the center, humanity followed a path that distanced it from the Earth and Nature. Incredible achievements were indeed made; obstacles posed by Nature and human nature itself were overcome, but the losses were significant. A chasm was created.

Nevertheless, there are certain cultures that, though struggling, genuinely engage with the Earth—not from a position of superiority, as the so-called Western world has grown accustomed to doing, but with a genuine intention to understand it and learn from it. This does not mean I advocate a return to the “Stone Age,” but rather that we should start paying attention again. We should go back to being humble. Less pretentious. My work, in a way, and with its limitations, seeks to do just that. To seek, to hope to find, and to reveal.

LB: You mentioned earlier that you’re an idealist. What would be a dream project you’d like to bring to life?

JM: Thank you for that question. I have a project I’ve been thinking about for several years that I really want to bring to life. I can’t stop thinking about it, actually, but it requires a great deal of logistics. It’s called Uma Floresta depois de um sonho (A Forest After a Dream). The title is a reference to Alberto Carneiro’s work Uma floresta para os teus sonhos (A Forest for Your Dreams). I’ve always wanted to somehow continue the work Alberto began, specifically what he called, back in the 1970s, Ecological Art. I feel it’s almost an obligation.

Ever since the Leiria pine forest burned almost to the ground in 2018, I have been deeply affected by it. I used to drive past those vast acres on my way to the beach in the summer with my family, and whenever we passed by, my father would always say that one day we would cycle the Atlantic Road. We never got around to doing it. Eight years after those apocalyptic fires—I was still in high school in Pombal during those days, and they were literally dark, with very thick smoke billowing from the pine forest—many tree trunks still stand. Burned. The imagery is very powerful. They look like stakes, crosses in a vast cemetery, reminiscent of Anselm Kiefer’s colossal paintings of fields.

I’ll do my best to sum it up. The project is divided into two parts. First, a large group of sculptures: charred and severed pine trees installed in a public space. I’d like it to be in Leiria, in a central part of the city. It would be a memorial, a memento mori to that great pine forest, but one that symbolizes much more than a specific place. The pine trees—sculptures—would be collected directly from the pine forests and then altered. The second phase of the project would take place on the day of the sculpture installation’s inauguration. But the inauguration would take place within the hectares of the pine forest. The idea would be to gather as large a group of volunteers as possible—hundreds—and plant thousands of trees in the spaces of the former pine forest. To create something tangible. A forest. The duration would depend on the time each volunteer wished to contribute. The goal would be to achieve something akin to Francis Alÿs’s work When Faith Moves Mountains, in a different context and with a tangible goal. A minimal movement leading to an enormous result.

BIOGRAPHY

Laurinda Branquinho (Portimão, 1996) has a degree in Multimedia Art - Audiovisuals from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Universidade de Lisboa. She did an internship in the Lisbon Municipal Archive Video Library, where she collaborated with the project TRAÇA in the digitization of family videos in film format. She recently finished her postgraduate degree in Art Curatorship at NOVA/FCSH, where she was part of the collective of curators responsible for the exhibition “Na margem da paisagem vem o mundo” and began collaborating with the Umbigo magazine.

ADVERTISING

article