Fertilidade is a six-hectare living artwork in the heart of Mação, Portugal. A place where the soil is not just tilled but tended, where rest is not absence but intention, and where the land becomes both collaborator and canvas.

Surrounded by conventionally worked agricultural fields reliant on heavy machinery and synthetic pesticides, 'Fertilidade' stands in deliberate opposition. It is the antithesis of industrial farming — not a site of extraction, but of exchange. Here, regenerative gardening practices rooted in permaculture and syntropic principles form the backbone of a slow, thoughtful relationship with the earth. This is a space where experimentation is not only allowed but encouraged, where ideas are seeded as freely as vegetables, and each season is a dialogue.

This work is inseparable from my artistic practice. Gardening is my therapy, my resistance, and my ritual. The physical labour, the composting of organic matter, the decision to let some things go fallow - these are not only acts of cultivation but of care and reflection. Fertilidade is where I engage with cycles of growth, decay, and renewal, cycles mirrored in creative process and personal transformation.

Through techniques like no-dig beds enriched with compost and sheep’s wool, chop-and-drop pruning, and companion planting, 'Fertilidade' is becoming a sanctuary - a place that invites insects, birds, and wild plants back into presence. It is a refuge for biodiversity, but also for the mind and body. A place where rest is not separate from productivity, but essential to it.

In cultivating 'Fertilidade', I am cultivating new ways of being with the land, with myself, and with others. It is an ongoing, living inquiry into how we might inhabit the earth more gently, and more imaginatively.