Gabriela Albergaria

Vale de Cambra, 1965
Lives and works in Lisbon and Brussels

The work of Gabriela Albergaria proposes a cosmovision based on the primacy of nature and on the need for its experience, investigation, revitalisation and cultural reconstruction. Through means including sculpture, installation, photography and drawing, her works propose the repair and healing of plant ecosystems weakened by a process of systematic destruction. Her work pushes back against the finiteness of natural resources with the creative and experimental power of art.

She recreates compositions in which drawings complete or imagine missing parts of landscape photographs, in which sculptures rebuild trees that are already dead or condemned to removal.

Gabriela Albergaria highlights, collects, groups, classifies, catalogues and manipulates natural specimens, revealing their diversity. She makes use of the colours, shapes and representations of these specimens’ constituent elements, transforming and decontextualising them to narrate a sensory and subjective experience, but also an aesthetics and politics of landscape.

She is interested in ecology, the history of gardening and the domestication of nature, botany and landscape architecture. Guided by a critical vision of the historical processes of appropriation, exploitation and acculturation of the natural world, Gabriela Albergaria subliminally appeals to an organic union with living nature.

Lígia Afonso
[Plano Nacional das Artes and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian]
Curator, teacher and researcher born in Lisbon in 1981
Text originally written for Google Arts & Culture apropos the exhibition “All I Want, Portuguese Women Artists from 1900 to 2020”, curated by Helena de Freitas and Bruno Marchand