Walking the Home/Land: Reflecting on a collective art project on the Setúbal peninsula
Introduced and Moderated by Alla Efimova
The RHOME (Representations of Home in Literatures and Cultures in English) international conference Sanctuaries and Displacements: Negotiating Home, Refuge, and Belonging
The School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, 25–26 June 2026.
Over an eighteen-month residency, with support from the Gulbenkian Foundation and the KunstWorks Fund, four artists set out to find the ghost of an unrealized infrastructure: a canal once proposed to connect Lisbon and Setúbal in Portugal, cutting across the peninsula to link two rivers that have always nearly touched—Tagus and Sado. The artists—Fernando Brito, Umberto Brito, Ema Ignácio, and Sérgio Godinho—are all rooted in the Setúbal peninsula. The project was called Atlas Coletivo – Inventário de uma Paisagem. Their method combined archival research into the canal’s failed plans with physical traversal of the land itself — walking the route it would have taken, mapping an absence. The canal proposals promised safer, faster passage between the two ports than the open sea allowed. The artists moved through the landscape looking for the residue of this unrealized plan. Their findings became an artist’s book of photographs, texts, and archival fragments — an atlas not of what exists, but of what almost did.
Why does this project speak to this conference’s theme of representations of home? At its core, Atlas Coletivo is about the knowledge of one’s own homeland — radically hyper-local, mapping one’s own backyard with the same seriousness and intentionality that once propelled the Portuguese maritime voyages of discovery. In the Portuguese context, that resonance is especially pointed. The Age of Discoveries was, after all, a project of mapping as a claim to ownership — cartography as both genuine discovery and instrument of conquest. Atlas Coletivo offers a quiet counterpoint to that grand narrative: these artists don’t venture far from home at all. They live on the Setúbal peninsula, and they walk it, smell it, listen to it, record it — not in search of postcard vistas or a conquistador’s zeal but to understand how the land has been, and continues to be, inhabited. The cluttered attic, the dark basement, the dusty cupboard of the homeland, rather than the distant horizon.