VIADO
VIADO is an ongoing multidisciplinary project combining photography, video performance, sound, and material processes to explore queer embodiment, masculinity, and the relationship between body and landscape. Rooted in queer ecology, the work reflects on nature as a space of transformation, contradiction, and resistance. The title references the Brazilian slur "viado", derived from "veado" (“deer”), historically used to police gender expression and queer identity. Through performance and self-representation, I reclaim this language by embodying the figure it attempts to marginalise. Across forests, rivers, tidal landscapes, and rural environments, the body moves between human, animal, and monstrous states, questioning ideas of masculinity, visibility, and belonging. Developed between the Brazilian countryside where I was raised and the landscapes of the New Forest in the UK, VIADO reflects on migration, cultural translation, and the instability of identity. The work approaches nature not as a passive backdrop or romantic refuge but as an active space where the body can dissolve, transform, and renegotiate itself outside rigid social structures. Throughout the project, gestures of ritual and self-care become acts of resistance: brushing hair in tidal waters, covering the skin in glitter, and interacting with antlers, mud, seaweed, roots, and organic matter. Glitter operates simultaneously as vulnerability and defiance, referencing femininity, queer visibility, and the violence historically projected onto bodies considered excessive or non-normative. Photography and moving image are used as tools for embodiment and performance rather than documentation alone. Through staged actions, immersive sound, and interactions with the landscape, VIADO proposes queerness as something inseparable from transformation, fluidity, and the natural world itself.
New Forest - UK / Cornwall - UK / Marialva - Brazil
2026 (ongoing)
Nature Is Queer
I see fragments around me.
Fragments of a continuous search for a place where I belong.
Sometimes it feels like I was born broken.
I’ve tried many tribes.
In some, I thought I had found a place.
But this feeling of loneliness remains stuck in my throat whenever I’m in the middle of a crowd.
As if there were a word trapped there.
A word that was never mine but that I was taught to carry.
Like the sound of birds, the voices around me blend into a single tone, and all I can hear is my own consciousness telling me that I am what’s left.
Nature holds me.
It accepts me and embraces me.
The leaves make themselves available to listen to my thoughts.
The roots bring me back to reality, and the textures of the trunks have taught me to persist.
I don’t fully understand this connection.
Sometimes I think it confuses me too.
Nature is queer.
In tidal pools, I find stones that haven’t yet been turned.
Beneath them, there is always the hope of finding something precious, even if I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for.
Maybe I invented this.
Or maybe I just learnt to survive what they called me.
The search continues.
And maybe it will never end.
I am tired.
My feet hurt.
My tongue can no longer bear to tell my story to politely disinterested people.
Nature is queer, and it doesn’t answer my questions.
On the contrary, it only deepens them.
At the edge of the sea, I brush my hair to the sound of birds and the movement of fish below.
In the water flowing toward the ocean, I paint my nails in preparation for the night.
Seaweed becomes an adornment on my body.
Shells are my reliquary.
And the sea is where I come undone.
Nature is queer, and I am queer.
At last, I can release your howl without fear.
Something in you takes over my vocal cords and feeds on my skin and muscles, and together we become one.
I hold you.
I love you.
I accept you.
You are now free.
The fear inside you softens.
The eyes that once saw you in darkness burst open when they meet your light.
You shine.
You are glitter.
As you leave my body, you watch me from the outside.
Your gaze offers me comfort, a sense of inner peace, self-love, and a shared solitude.
You no longer need to be afraid.
Come back inside me.
Make my voice yours.
Make my walk yours.
Let my eyes see through you.
Together, we become one.
The sun touches our skin and reflects a light that is yours and mine: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.
A rainbow is born from within us.
I no longer need to understand where you came from.
Nor where you are going.
It is enough to know that you are here.
That you breathe with me.
That you see through my eyes.
That you feel through my skin.
My Viado queer monster.
Finally, at peace.
