uma escola é uma floresta é uma escola

uma escola é uma floresta é uma escola, 2026


Raffia panels, galvanised steel / approx. 250 x 200 cm each

The tip of the palm tree’s spiny stem is crowned by a deep bluish-green sea of fan-shaped leaves, like the ocean that carried its seeds to Porto Santo. Although they appear fragile, these leaves have helped withstand many droughts. Droughts that arrive with the air sharpened by the salt of the sea, eroding time and matter and returning the island’s worn soil to the depths of the sea. These same leaves, now in the hands of Maria Amélia Melim, joined with those of Fernanda Fragateiro, point to another aridity – invisible – created by oblivion, which numbs even the island’s air and causes leaves, hands and thoughts to vanish within it. In Macaronesia, in the archipelago of the Fortunate Isles, palm trees are a living memory, an immense material canvas that gives rise to moving plant and human bodies, to the breeze, to the shade, to braided palm-leaf strands dancing amidst the fingers of craftswomen. Movements that place a number of questions posed by the artist centre-stage: What does it mean to learn from a place and from the living matter that shapes it? Where does the line between creations arising from craftsmanship and those of art become imperceptible? Could the school – a Forest School – be an oasis in the face of the alienation of the times we live in, against forced distances and oblivion?

On the table lies the project uma escola é uma floresta é uma escola, which Fernanda has just sent me. In it, the word cantina (canteen), inscribed within a work of collective creation – something that always raises conflicts and questions about the work of art and its authorship – stands out once again. The project proposes an ephemeral artistic intervention through a community-based process involving the beneficiaries of CACI (Centro de Atividades e Capacitação para a Inclusão/Centre for Activities and Training for Inclusion) and the CRESCER association, who are creating the panels with Fernanda Fragateiro. They are joined by the craftswomen Maria Amélia and Otília Melim, with their palm leaf braid measuring over seven metres, in a place that had been disused for some time and has now been reclaimed for culture: the former Porto Santo Primary School.

In the preliminary sketches for uma escola é uma floresta é uma escola, palm-leaves and raffia join hands, arranged in a grid pattern from large panels composed of countless strands of unravelled fibres that play with the space. Geometry – as present in Chorão Ramalho’s architecture and in Fernanda Fragateiro’s drawing – now incorporates the breath of plants. A material dialogue redefines the reading of space, opening up new lines within it and, in the process, adding another layer of perspectives: in some regions of Africa, such as Angola, Congo and Gabon, these plant fibres, woven into cloth (to which the panels may refer), served as currency – the Libongo – in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Among the Portuguese artist’s most recent projects is É uma escultura, a collaboration with the studio SIA arquitectura + André Gonçalves. In this project, and in anticipation of the installation in the canteen of the former Primary School, we recall the process of working with CRESCER, which involved the construction of a welcoming and light-filled canopy made by people in vulnerable situations: a large panel of woven raffia that welcomes us into a restaurant whose mission is to promote social inclusion and access to work. Thinking and acting together, in continuity with other matters – as Fernanda Fragateiro proposes in projects linked to food and learning – keeps an artistic practice that is attuned to the times in which we live alive; a practice that understands creation within a form of dwelling and through a necessarily plural way of doing: an inhabiting with.
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Alfredo Puente