PADA Studios

This residency, akin to José Saramago’s exploration of Portugal’s reality and historical context in *Viagema Portugal*, undertakes a comparable journey, focusing on the current state of Portugal’s vast forest regions and the devastating impact of fires, largely attributed to *Eucalyptus globulus*, which makes up 26.2% of the country’s forest area. Eucalyptus trees, with their highly flammable sap and bark, pose a particular danger, igniting new fires up to 100 meters away when they burn. Remarkably, in 2016, Portugal accounted for over 50% of all fires in the European Union. The eucalyptus industry, contributing 1.5% to the country’s GDP, influences the increasing frequency of fires, devastating Portuguese forests each year. In the *Viagem a Portugal* series, each piece features 26% of its surface covered in eucalyptus ash, symbolizing the proportion of *Eucalyptus globulus* in Portugal’s forests.

The work *Campos de Cultivo* occupies the vast, endemic landscape located in the abandoned lands of the Quimiparque Business Park, an industrial area in the Portuguese city of Barreiro, to reinterpret urban aesthetics on a large scale, where diverse flora emerges, reclaiming its territory. The characteristics of the urban environment—spaces designated for assembly line production and manufacturing as symbols of modernization and progress, now forgotten and abandoned—are referenced through the installation of industrial elements. The piece resembles micro-industrial cities like cultivated fields, between remnants and scrap, where a botanical atlas of the region is expected to flourish through natural dispersal.

Additionally, the eucalyptus forest video installation presents a video projection of a eucalyptus forest in Barreiro, Portugal, where LED lights activate upon detecting human presence, highlighting the correlation between human activity and forest fires in these eucalyptus forests.