I crossed Campanhã and Bonfim while growing up, the window on the 6th floor with the dead-end streets of grandparents, aunts and cousins. From the parallel and simultaneous paths in community psychology and artistic creation, I found breath in what was close to the human. I recognized myself in associative movements and in civic and political action. I crossed public education with non-formal education in Portugal, Brazil, France and Spain. I insisted on encounters that inspire me with Eugenio Barba, Augusto Boal, Carlo Bosso, Ademar Bianchi, Edith Scher, Sanjoy Ganguly and so many others with whom I surprise myself in inevitable crossings every day. In between, and for the best, I co-created with professional and non-professional artists in prisons, community centers, schools, social neighborhoods, where I felt closer to life. We present shows together in public spaces, factories and auctions, national theaters and festivals, in Brazil and China. I dreamed and implemented with good accomplices the creation of Pele, of the Theater of the Oppressed Nucleus, of Nómada, of experimental projects in the context of public policies in Santa Maria da Feira. I crossed higher education, with workshops, conferences, residencies, teaching with learning, the body with the word, art with politics. I built ways to program with others, multiple and diverse curatorships, space where I continue to learn how it’s done. I crossed artistic creation with thinking about it in consultancy for municipalities and public projects and for the Calouste Gulbenkian and BPI / La Caixa Foundations. Still in this way, I wrote, like breathing into a confused and opaque reality. Today I’m still looking for how to cross the world as it is, to perfect myself in this craft of mixing things and people, and to do this it is essential to know where they come from. The territory where I am constituted is this one – that of the crossing.
