Lidas de Mestras (2026)

In the park of Serralves stands a large-leaved lime tree that has long since dedicated herself to offer and teach. Lidas de Mestras, a word play with "lidas domésticas" (meaning house chores) and "mestras" (masters in the feminine), springs from this encounter: a living work that embraces and is embraced by the tree, woven from textile arms that welcome the hands of human and more-than-human masters. It is a place to be, create and share. Brought to life through husking maize, shared meals, embroidery and folk singing, the work revives something contemporary life tends to erase: the sharing of informal knowledge, passed from hand to hand, without a textbook and without haste. Here, care is threshing corn together, embroidering while gossiping, and singing a song whose origins have been long forgotten. Inês Coelho da Silva proposes a political practice disguised as an everyday gesture: who looks after whom, around this tree? What knowledge is lost when we stop sitting together? The work departs from the ethymology of Ecology: knowledge of the home - here both domestic and planetary - and offers the possibility of spending time together in the slow rhythm of a weekend. Inês has invited friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends from her hometown, the small rural city of Fiães, to harvest the corn with her, to join the husking cerimony in singing and playing, and to join forces in making small sculpture out of the corn leaves. The work included an edible installation which responded to the themes of each day of the festival: the lime tree, the corn, and the spontaneous neighbouring plants, as well as a botanical walk and lots of gossip.

Text by Patrícia Craveiro Lopes

Commissioned by BoilFest and Fundação de Serralves

In collaboration with: Monika Błoch, Iga Nawara, Fábio Silva, FICA Fiães, Fernanda Botelho.

Photographs by Mário Bock