Abstract Disquietudes: The Entrails & Hummings is an ongoing artistic research project developed in collaboration with Barcelos-based ceramist António Ramalho. Since 2023, our dialogue has unfolded through drawing, clay, etching, short stories and expanded footnotes, generating a constellation of ceramic figures—Entrails (Longing, Trauma, Denial, Implicated) and Hummings (Rhetoric, Lament, Fable, Silence).
Emerging from the figurative clay tradition of northern Portugal—historically intertwined with folklore, markets and narratives of national identity—these works reorient a vernacular language toward questions of colonial memory and its afterlives. Traditionally inhabiting domestic interiors and circulating through local markets, such figures carry stories of saints, professions and popular myth; here, they hold other narratives. The project approaches this material tradition as a site of inquiry into how colonial memory lingers—in gestures, domestic objects, pedagogical repetition and half-forgotten stories. Etchings and short texts, accompany each figures, while expanded notes trace historical frameworks running beneath them. As the ceramic figures become integrated into Ramalho’s repertoire and circulate through local markets, they enter domestic space, generating intimate conversations about difficult and often silenced pasts.
The research unfolds through what I call material fabulation: working with clay, drawing and narrative as sites where inherited histories are tested, displaced and reconfigured. Through this process, historical narratives are not described but physically unsettled, allowing affect, hesitation and contradiction to surface. For the SAR Forum, I propose an in-person presentation introducing context and methodology, followed by readings of Longing and Lament, engaging the theme of “Endangered Conceptual Worlds” by reflecting on how inherited histories persist and can be reworked through vernacular material practice.