This text is from a conversation that took place at the Dias Das Dança Festival 2026, on the 13th of April as a part of the Live Art Writers Network programme at A PiSCiNA, featuring contributions from Pedro Vilela, Dori Nigro and Tiziano Cruz.
These bodies in this city: situated landscapes in performance and critical writing
How might performance and creative/critical writing become practices that belong and echo the city and those who live in it? This conversation brings together performers with a socially engaged practice and writers to reflect collectively on the role of performance within a city. Moving from within and beyond institutional and festival contexts, the discussion asks what performance can offer to everyday life, and how it might address, interrupt, or speak back to the city and its communities. The conversation convenes performers working in socially engaged ways alongside critics interested in writing that carries a social dimension, writing that reaches beyond the art world echo chamber and remains accountable to lived experience, public space, and civic life.
This contribution by Pedro Vilela was originally given in Portuguese, and translated to English for publication. See the Portuguese version here.
The other interventions, by Dori Nigro and Tiziano Cruz, can be accessed HERE.
In January of this year, I defended my doctoral dissertation titled “Performing the Rupture: Notes on Confronting Coloniality in the Portuguese Performing Arts,” as part of the Doctoral Program in Arts Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.
This thesis is based on the understanding that coloniality is not a residual vestige of Portugal’s past, but an active regime of world organization that continues to shape power relations, modes of knowledge production, politics of memory, and hierarchies of the sensible in the present.
Throughout my research, I have sought to demonstrate how this regime manifests itself in a particularly incisive way in the field of the performing arts, operating both in the construction of symbolic repertoires and in the institutional mechanisms of legitimation, exclusion, and silencing.
To this end, I drew on everyday scenes, often overlooked, that serve as a framework for shaping both my field of research and my artistic practice. Each scene bears the marks of historical violence, yet also gives rise to strategies of survival, invention, and continuity.
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SCENE I
In recent months, the city of Porto has undergone a political race to select its new representatives.
One day, I came across an institutional letter posted at the entrance to the building where I live. It introduced a candidate for mayor, and on the envelope was a simple phrase, almost like a call to action: “We are Porto.”
After all, who exactly is this “we”? Everyone who lives in the city, regardless of class, background, or race? Or just those who fit into a narrower definition of belonging?
I later learned that this same candidate won the election by a margin of two thousand votes. And I keep asking: who are “we”?
Perhaps the question is not merely about identifying who is included, but about realizing who is quietly left out. Because any “we” that is not explained or questioned runs the risk of being less of a collective and more of a boundary.
SCENE II
One day, while noticing the large number of bicycles in the warehouse of a company based in this city, I asked, out of curiosity, if they were props from a previous production. The answer was blunt: it was a “Latin American heist.”
The director then went on to explain, almost matter-of-factly, that during a tour of the Netherlands, the company had used the set transport van to stop at a bicycle parking lot on the way back from the performances and steal several bicycles. That was how his “collection” of bicycles had come about.
The shock, of course, wasn’t just because of the theft, but because of the attempt to link it to Latin America. Still, I kept up the pretense and pressed the question: why “a Latin American theft”?
The final answer was short and to the point: “Because we did something that everyone in your country does.” How long will we be a “fantasy construct,” an “ideological projection”?
SCENE III
Over the course of several months, I sent a series of emails to the artistic director of the São João National Theater, a Portuguese state-run organization, to discuss a project I’ve been fighting to bring to fruition since 2023 in Porto: Quilombo_TREMA!, a festival dedicated to Black, racialized, and Indigenous artists. None of them were answered. After persistent attempts, I managed to get his phone number and decided to contact him directly, finally managing to schedule a “meeting.”
The experience was, to say the least, unconventional: he spoke with me right in the middle of the street, as he walked up and down a hill on his way to a small store, where he bought two packs of cigarettes. Between his haste and the cigarette smoke, he told me he was interested in the proposal and asked me to get back in touch in two weeks, after a trip he needed to take.
Over the next six months, I tried to stay in touch. All my messages were read, but none were replied to. Over time, I realized this wasn’t an isolated incident. Whenever I share this experience, other similar stories emerge, reflecting the same pattern.
At the end of the year, the director’s contract was renewed for another three years in recognition of his outstanding service to the Portuguese people. But the question that remains is this: how many and which bodies will continue to lie, silently, outside these spaces?
SCENE IV
In March 2026, Portugal abstained in a UN vote which declared the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized enslavement to be the “most serious crime against humanity.” The resolution, proposed by Ghana and approved by 123 countries, also called for the implementation of historical reparations—reigniting tensions between the Global South and Western powers.
Only three countries voted against the resolution: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. Portugal—a nation that once led the transatlantic slave trade – joined 52 other countries, including France, the United Kingdom, and Spain, in abstaining. Abstention is not neutral – it seems to prolong a deeper hesitation, the difficulty of acknowledging past violence, and the inability to assume present responsibility.
SCENE V
In the context of the official artistic program for Évora 2027 – European Capital of Culture, I came across an open call directed at international artists residing or based in Europe, with the aim of exploring the concept of “VAGAR,” the event’s central theme. The call, evaluated by renowned figures in European curatorship, established the following guidelines for projects: “to propose creations that reinforce the human essence and imagine other futures, in line with European values.”
Since I depend on projects to make a living, I found myself wondering what those “European values” might be – and whether, in fact, my practice could or should align with them: colonialism, imperialism, slavery, racism, wars… I realized that the issue wasn’t just one of context, but of stance. And so, in the end, I didn’t submit any projects.
SCENE VI
Following the opening conference of Quilombo_Trema! in 2023 at the Municipal Theater of Porto, researcher Leda Maria Martins—a leading figure in Brazilian Black theater—held a book-signing session for an audience that was predominantly Black.
During the gathering, the stage lights were simply turned off. More than a technical gesture, it came across as a sign of interruption—almost of expulsion. Faced with the situation, Leda suggested continuing at the theater entrance. And it was there, on the sidewalk, taking advantage of a lull in the rain, that the gathering continued. The episode is neither isolated nor innocent. It highlights how certain bodies continue to be tolerated only up to a certain limit. Beyond that, they become surplus.
SCENE VII
Every week, I greet my 4-year-old daughter when she comes home. In her stories about school, small acts of violence have become a recurring theme – subtle demarcations that she is beginning to notice and name.
She tells me: “Dad, they say I’m not Portuguese, that I don’t speak Portuguese, that I speak ‘Brazilian.’ Dad, I was born here.” These conversations are merely the surface of something deeper that permeates everyday school life in this country: moments when difference becomes a target.
Take, for example, the case of a 13-year-old Brazilian boy who was beaten in December 2025 until he lost consciousness. Or that of a 9-year-old Brazilian girl who had his fingertips amputated after being bullied by classmates—even after his mother had alerted the school to incidents of xenophobia and racism.
Between what is said at home and what happens outside it, a question begins to take shape – one that is not merely educational, but social: what forms of belonging are we, after all, teaching our children – and at what cost?
SCENE VIII
While walking through the city of Porto, it became common to come across offensive posters targeting the immigrant community. It also became a recurring occurrence to be stopped during police operations, always with a specific focus: checking my residence permit, as if my presence is, in and of itself, the object to be validated. What might once have been seen as an exception gradually became routine, the norm. And perhaps that is where the most unsettling aspect lies: when the repetition of suspicion ceases to seem strange and becomes part of the silent workings of everyday life?
*****
It is precisely through my confrontations with some of these everyday scenes that I have been driven as a creator, programmer, and researcher, through a practice marked by friction, discomfort, and a refusal to compromise, producing what I termed in my dissertation “notes of confrontation”: interventions that destabilize consensus, expose historical silences, and interrogate the conditions of access to the scene, to speak, and to recognition in the artistic field.
It is within this framework that the notion of “performing rupture”—which gave the thesis its title—also finds its place. Far from being limited to discursive denunciation or thematic illustrations of colonial violence, rupture is understood as a practice—a bodily and temporal event that unfolds in the encounter between bodies, audiences, institutions, and artistic devices.
Given that we are still immensely far from definitively overcoming coloniality, I consider it absolutely necessary for us to engage in an unstable, process-oriented practice, one marked by tensions, failures, and resistances, that continually renews itself within the performance scene as a field of contestation and negotiation of meanings. It is from this understanding that I assert that inhabiting, producing, and moving through Portugal entails a permanent performance of survival. A recurring confrontation with the phantasmagorical condition, in which the body is visible but rarely recognized as fully human or a legitimate producer of knowledge. There is an urgent need for us to organize ourselves and undertake an urgent work of imagination, reclaiming emancipatory and pragmatic utopias and creating more post-racist, post-patriarchal, and post-capitalist institutions.
Perhaps the greatest challenge is to channel the anger I feel in my chest or to give form to the restlessness of inhabiting, performing, and transforming the place I have chosen to live. The truth is that I always tend to say in places like these: “You better thank God, because after so much misfortune over the centuries, revenge has come, for now, only in writing or as an artistic practice.” After all, “Europe remains indefensible.”
Pedro Vilela is an artist, curator and researcher. A PhD candidate in Art Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto, he runs TREMA!, an association that fosters artistic links between Brazil and Portugal, and collaborates with various organisations in the city of Porto. His primary focus is on the Afro-Latin American scene, exploring themes such as decoloniality and mechanisms of raciality. He is also the first Latin American to win the Magaly Muguercia Scholarship, awarded by the Iberescena Programme.