Creative Direction / Collaborations 𓍊𓋼𓍊
The Gramounce
Visual diary
About
Mariana Martins de Oliveira is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice intersects food, ecology, education, and participatory art. Her work explores the relationships between food cultures, ecological sustainability, collective memory, and everyday practices of care through collaborative methodologies, slow processes, and repetitive gestures often rooted in rural contexts and vernacular knowledge.
Her artistic practice unfolds through performative meals, installations, workshops, editorial projects, and image- and text-based works, where food operates simultaneously as material, language, and a tool for gathering. Through these formats, she creates spaces for conviviality, dialogue, and critical reflection around contemporary ecological, social, and cultural issues, addressing themes such as collective responsibility, food systems, and often invisible forms of labour and care.
In recent years, she has developed an ongoing research focus on rural life in Alentejo, with particular attention to labour practices, food traditions, and everyday forms of organisation transmitted orally across generations. Her work seeks to build a living archive of situated knowledge related to agriculture, resource management, domestic economies, and embodied care practices, while also reflecting on women’s labour conditions and the ecologies of the body.
Since 2018, she has regularly collaborated with museums, cultural institutions, and independent projects in the field of public programmes and arts education. Alongside her artistic practice, she works in creative direction, food design, cultural production, and communication. In 2024, she co-founded Pousio, a transdisciplinary research collective centred on the Alentejo region that explores alternative approaches to urgent ecological and cultural challenges.
Her artistic practice unfolds through performative meals, installations, workshops, editorial projects, and image- and text-based works, where food operates simultaneously as material, language, and a tool for gathering. Through these formats, she creates spaces for conviviality, dialogue, and critical reflection around contemporary ecological, social, and cultural issues, addressing themes such as collective responsibility, food systems, and often invisible forms of labour and care.
In recent years, she has developed an ongoing research focus on rural life in Alentejo, with particular attention to labour practices, food traditions, and everyday forms of organisation transmitted orally across generations. Her work seeks to build a living archive of situated knowledge related to agriculture, resource management, domestic economies, and embodied care practices, while also reflecting on women’s labour conditions and the ecologies of the body.
Since 2018, she has regularly collaborated with museums, cultural institutions, and independent projects in the field of public programmes and arts education. Alongside her artistic practice, she works in creative direction, food design, cultural production, and communication. In 2024, she co-founded Pousio, a transdisciplinary research collective centred on the Alentejo region that explores alternative approaches to urgent ecological and cultural challenges.