Interview with Tiago Rocha Costa, author of the Umbigo.space cover

interview

DATE

03 Feb 2026

AUTHOR

Maria Inês Mendes

Interview with Tiago Rocha Costa, author of the Umbigo.space cover

AUTHOR

Maria Inês Mendes

At the Atelier Concorde, on Rua Leite de Vasconcelos, we spoke with Tiago Rocha Costa (Évora, 1995) about his artistic practice, built at the intersection of theoretical research, material experimentation, and fiction. The conversation covers topics such as the production of knowledge through art, artificiality, ruin and deep time, as well as the plastic processes that shape his ‘invented archaeologies’. Between the rigour of the project and the incorporation of chance, this interview contextualises a work that calls on different temporalities to rethink our relationship with the natural world.

Maria Inês Mendes: Your work is divided into two axes: on the one hand, you have a research component focused mainly on the relationship between visual arts, scientific knowledge, and fiction; on the other hand, you have your artistic practice. I would begin by asking how you manage the boundary between the artistic and the scientific. I am also interested in understanding whether you see artistic practice as a way of producing knowledge or as a product of ongoing research.

Tiago Rocha Costa: The question of theoretical-practical research has been very present in my work due to my doctoral studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. There is a continuity between these two bodies of work, and they inform each other. That is, what I do in the studio makes me want to investigate some theoretical themes, often outside the exclusive domain of the arts. And the research itself also encourages me to go to the studio to test plastic and formal issues that are more or less related to what I am studying.

The focus of my research has, in fact, been this relationship between artistic production, knowledge, and fiction. Because I believe that it is in the convergence of these three disciplinary areas that we can arrive at some kind of truth about the world around us, about how anthropogenic human phenomena modify what we understand as the natural world. The question of fiction arises in relation to matter and the plasticity of materials and ends up being a way of overcoming the objectivity that we associate with scientific rigor. I am interested in using the mechanisms of visual arts and fiction, in a broader sense, to raise questions (and deconstruct others) regarding the overarching theme, which is our relationship with the natural world.

MM: When you mention our relationship with the natural world, do you understand nature as a concept in crisis?

TRC: In crisis and deeply connected to human culture. At one time, these were two separate concepts, and although this desire to see nature as something pure, isolated, something that can be contemplated and from which we are marginalized persists, I think that's a romantic projection onto something that isn't exactly like that anymore. And that's why I try to incorporate an artificial dimension into my work, whether in terms of artistic creation or in terms of the materials I use.

MM: This artificiality you mention also reminds us of the invented archaeologies you construct. How do these artifacts fit into your artistic research?

TRC: These structures function like fictional fossils, which I conceive from the inside out, down to the outermost layers, and which function almost like glazes in a painting. I want to create pieces that seem not to have been built by me, that were found, and that are evidence of a time and space that doesn't exactly match the present. This artificiality has a lot to do with this simulation of the natural world that takes us to other places.

MM: Besides the concept of invented archaeology, the idea of ruin also seems central to your work. What interests you about this liminal condition between life, trace, and ruin?

TRC: For me, a ruin is an object or entity in potential, anything that is in an intermediate state between what its original form could be and its definitive oblivion. It is this intermediate state that allows us to speculate about what the piece can become. My work always begins with very rigorous and rational models. But at a certain point, I began to realize that these geometric structures, despite being formally interesting and reflecting some of my concerns, don't work. I realized that it was necessary to subject these pieces to plastic processes that would allow me to reach this condition of the vestige-object.

MM: What processes do you use to arrive at this condition of a vestige-object?

TRC: As I said, I always start with models, and the goal is to create a rule, a generating principle that works for a series of objects and gives some coherence to the whole. In the case of Colunas de Saturno, I mean a rule of growth, in which the interior space of the piece lengthens and allows the sphere to move differently.

But these rules must be subverted. After this initial phase, which is a design and planning stage, comes a freer and more sensory phase in which the pieces are subjected to a fossilization process. This begins with a series of layers of mortar, made of sand, ash, lime, earth, and pigments. The first layers are always thicker; they are constructive layers in which I am still working on the form – adding something to these volumes and erasing them. The last layers become thinner and are no longer constructive – their importance lies in questions of color, texture, and luminosity of the surface itself. The piece becomes more pictorial as this process progresses. At this stage, I often forget the first object I had drawn with a ruler and set square. These layers of mortar run off the pieces and settle a little everywhere. There is an incorporation of ‘accidents’ with the material itself, which becomes impossible to control. The truth is, while I'm very strict in the initial stages, once I have that part secured, it's essential to let go of that and incorporate some of that studio energy as well. In the end, I believe the pieces are a sum of all these chance occurrences.

Perhaps the best example of incorporating chance into my work is the piece Synthetic Sealife. I really enjoy going to DIY and gardening stores and buying objects that are meaningful from the point of view of our relationship with others, whether with animals, plants, or the cycles of the natural world. There was a time when I started buying fishing lures, which are simulations of plastic worms. We are here in a completely artificial domain, emulating the forms of nature. One day, I left some of these lures in the studio on some blue boards, and when I arrived, I noticed that they were releasing a corrosive substance and sinking into the board. For me, this event was like producing a synthetic fossil. And the truth is that I never tried to understand this chance in chemical terms; I'm not interested in knowing what happened, for me it's almost magic.

MM: This description of your process leads us, for example, to your most recent Vanitas (2025), which was presented at Duplex, as part of the Hedone project, coordinated by Diogo Ramalho from Galeria Plato. How does this piece, and in particular the question of pleasure, fit into your research?

TRC: From a plastic point of view, the piece was constructed according to the fossilization process I described. This piece is a kind of painting box, which reminds us of a cage, but also a transport box, and it was built by me. I wanted to create an object that would be familiar to us and, at the same time, not entirely explicit. This means that part of the process was carpentry work. Then, at a certain point, I forgot what it was and began to treat it plastically in another way, adding the books and the fruits, which are molds of authentic fruits, destroyed to simulate some interactions between fruits and animals that I observed at the Lisbon Zoo, for example.

Regarding the overarching theme of the Hedone project, about which I presented this piece, I don't think that was decisive. This was a piece I had wanted to do for a long time, and after it was completed, I managed to establish some connections with the theme of pleasure and money, which was the sub-theme assigned to me. I think this assignment can be justified as follows: I had begun to observe some 16th and 17th-century paintings by the Flemish painter Frans Snyders. There is something very interesting in these paintings: they are Baroque still lifes, in which the compositions are always complemented by exotic animals, mainly parrots and small monkeys, which are depicted alive, interacting with the fruits and destroying the compositions. There is a very large contrast between the hunted animals, which were presented as carcasses alongside the fruits, and these exotic animals. I was struck by the way the exotic was treated, how these animals were seen as merchandise, as a symbol of status, power, and money by the upper social classes.

MM: The theme of the exotic also appears in the project you developed at the National Museum of Natural History and Science, which resulted in the presentation of the Coro Verde exhibition at the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory. Could you tell us a little more about this project and your relationship with exotic birds?

TRC: Exotic birds and animals have been a recurring theme in my work for as long as I can remember, but they appear in different ways. In the Natural History exhibition, for example, this theme appears more clearly, possibly because the entire exhibition focused on a particular invasive exotic species, the rose-ringed parakeet. In the case of Vanitas, the reference is perhaps less obvious, but it is mainly related to this structure that could be used to transport exotic birds between continents. In general, I am interested in identifying an ambiguous relationship with the exotic. On the one hand, when they are on the other side of the ocean, these species are highly desired. On the other hand, when they become an everyday presence, they are considered invasive, and this is also reflected in our indifference, in our impulse to suppress this type of expression.

MM: This project you developed also had an editorial spin-off. What was it like to develop this project?

TRC: The Hedone project, divided into 4 sub-themes, resulted in four exhibitions by four different artists, as well as a publication. For me, this publication is almost an archive of the project, bringing together a considerable part of the research that preceded the exhibition.

Working on paper was a very curious process because it worked in reverse to what I normally do. I have some work on paper, drawings and sketches, but I never present them. Here, I started precisely with paper. The publication doesn't document the final work, which, for me, would be the easiest way to resolve a project on paper, but it anticipates some aspects that would become relevant. The visual essay is a visual treatment of the references that inform the work and presents some clues to what I was developing in the studio.

As I mentioned, I made some visits to the Lisbon Zoo to understand how the animals interacted with the cage and the fruit. Essentially, I was searching for the imagery in Frans Snyders' paintings. In the Hedone editorial project, associated with the exhibition, we find some photographs of situations that, for me, are clearly still lifes. But the project also recovers my research work in some digital archives of natural history museums. We see silhouettes of birds – study skins – and primate skulls, always at a 1:1 scale, which is something I've been using in my more two-dimensional works like Conceito Tropical (Salão dos Pássaros). Ultimately, I'm interested in understanding that we can juxtapose images from the 17th century with contemporary images and archival images. And the investigation is precisely about understanding how these references dialogue with each other and what that says about us. It's not that there's a specific intention to propose a solution. I don't have any work that indicates an explicit path. What I do is construct a vision in the studio, although I consider the work ideologically clear.

MM: Your work crosses many references, taking us simultaneously to the past, present, and future. It's difficult to place your pieces in time. How does the question of temporality emerge in your work?

TRC: I work a lot on the concept of deep time, which has to do with a non-human temporality, with anything that we, as a species, haven't had the opportunity to witness. This is a scenario that gives us every reason to be quite humble about the position we occupy on the planet. This understanding of deep time is very evident in the piece Meganeura, which is the name of a prehistoric dragonfly that was the largest flying insect of all time. This piece was built on an anthropomorphic scale and designed to resemble a fly swatter. The main goal was to confront the beauty of this creature, which we only know through the fossil record, with the present time – that time in which we have an absurd risk of insect plagues and obey a very immediate extermination impulse. The Sopa Primordial ("Primordial Soup") series, which is a kind of plastic interpretation of a scientific theory about the origin of life – which tells us about some puddles of water where all the ingredients would be gathered – also refers us to this distant pre-human temporality.

MM: It's curious that most of the works you mention were developed in series. In a way, seriality seems related to scientific classification itself, which groups and categorizes species of living beings according to the morphological characteristics they share. Similar to this classification, we also find in your body of work sets of pieces that, although they follow a common matrix, have small variations. Is this a choice you made or something you naturally tend towards?

TRC: There are several reasons for working in series, and the relationship you establish with scientific classification is perhaps the main one. The first reason that led me to work this way was primarily a matter of comfort and effort management. It's easier for me to work on two or three pieces simultaneously than to put all my efforts into one piece, risking losing the path I want to follow. I feel that working on various formal variations of an idea allows me to see things that aren't immediately present. It's important for me not to give up on these fragments and reflections of what was an idea. In the case of the Colunas da Saturno, for example, I chose to work in series because I wanted to create a space that could be inhabited, that had so many pieces that the viewer would have to walk between them. Only through seriality could I construct this idea of a lost archive, of a collection that had been discovered.

MM: You were mentioning earlier that the theme of birds and exotic animals has been recurrent in your work for as long as I can remember. Could you tell us a little more about your path?

TRC: I believe I gained more awareness of these themes during my master’s degree in fine arts, but during my studies in Visual Arts in Évora, these themes were already present; this obsession comes from before. It was a more pictorial body of work, which had a lot to do with these processes of appropriating surfaces, with this idea of an archaeology of painting, and also with an attention to the way matter is deposited on human constructions, almost as a metaphor for what happens in geology, with various layers from different eras that can be read like a book.

I remember in my second year, during a portrait course, doing my first work with exotic birds. I have no affinity for the human figure, so I decided to take some calcium blocks that are given to birds to sharpen their beaks, placed them on plinths, and treated them as if they were small sculptural busts. I was already interested in working in series and, at the same time, thinking that the animal could also have agency. A few years later, in 2018 or 2019, I made a series of classic speaker boxes that were intended as toys for domestic birds and that were being destroyed by their beaks. It's a work that recovers some historical references, such as the fact that parrots arrived in Europe during Classical Antiquity following Alexander the Great's incursions into India. These birds were perceived as exotic curiosities, but they were also quite mistreated. Therefore, what I did was subvert this symbol of classical culture, offering it to the animals themselves.

These are just two examples of the ideas I've been revisiting. And, in fact, I think the important ideas are precisely those we revisit, despite our lives changing and having more references. For some reason we don't understand, we always return to the same topics. And this process of revisiting allows me to draw some conclusions, namely realizing that fictional practices and art are fundamental for us to recover our origins and project other alternative futures, which don't necessarily have to be catastrophic. Although my work sometimes has a melancholic tone and seeks to recover anything that has been lost, I focus on the possibility of these pieces being portals to other things and other realities.

BIOGRAPHY

Maria Inês Mendes is is studying for a master's degree in Art Criticism and Curatorship at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. In 2024, she completed her degree in Communication Sciences at NOVA University Lisbon. She has written about cinema on CINEblog, a page promoted by NOVA's Institute of Philosophy. She is currently responsible for UMBIGO online, where she publishes regularly, and collaborates with BEAST - International Film Festival.

ADVERTISING

article