Project 48
Perfect Conditions to Flourish - Carla Rebelo
curated by Cristina Reid
November 14th - December 19th, in conjunction with Loop Video Art Festival. Opening reception Friday November 14th from 19h
For “Perfect Conditions to Flourish”, artist Carla Rebelo presents a new video and photography installation in Tangent Projects gallery as part of Loop Video Art Festival 2026.
“gardens are, an attitude toward nature.”
The work invites the viewer to reconnect with the garden, or rather what is deeply rooted within it.
Associations with flourishing, growth and promises of harmony and peace, is simply the surface of an underlying history of control, violence, power, and oppression over human and non-human life.
Rebelo’s work is in conversation with Amílcar Cabral’s agronomic study of the term “Mesology” which was both at one point the study the relations of living things to their environments but also the study of ways of attaining happiness. Cabral focused on preparing people, language, and the land for a constant “becoming,” capable of confronting colonial histories but also future forms of oppression, privatisation, and environmental destruction.
“Like plants, we are rooted into a place and not given any other choice than to quietly resist the pressures imposed upon us.” This work is a holding space for the complicated and beautiful contradictions that emerge when asked to acknowledge the violent underpinnings of the spaces we inhabit, while reclaiming and reimagining these very spaces.
Carla Rebelo (1994, Sao Tome and Principe) is an interdisciplinary artist working between Lisbon and Barcelona.
She works across photography, video, and installation to explore instability, ambiguity, and contradiction within the tense dialogue between body and place. Carla embraces walking and writing as research tools that surface new layers of understanding as she engages with themes of language, memory, desire, and space.
With a background in Aerospace Engineering, she received photographic training at El Observatorio in Barcelona, specialising in photographic narratives. She participated in the Catchupa Factory artist residency for emerging photographers in Mindelo and in the Affective Ecologies artist residency at Hangar in Lisbon, both supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Her work has been showcased in group and solo exhibitions in Cape Verde, Mozambique, Martinique, Portugal, and Spain.
Cristina Reid (1993, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Barcelona.
She has a bachelor's degree in Art History from Syracuse University (New York, 2016) and an MFA in Artistic Production and Research with a focus in Art and Technology of the Image (ATI) at the University of Barcelona, where she presented her thesis at La Capella (June 2025). She has a diploma in Studio Arts from Metàfora Studio Arts Program (Barcelona, 2023).
Cristina’s video work has been exhibited during Loop Festival City Screen (Barcelona 2022), Sala Equis (Madrid 2023), 200 Cent (Barcelona 2023), and during StripArt Festival (Barcelona 2024), where she was selected for a residency at ESFar Cultural’s Casa d’Artistes (Menorca, 2024).
Solo exhibitions include Maintenance at Espai Souvenir through the framework of Art Nou Emerging Art Festival (Barcelona 2024) and at NAVEL art space through the framework of Proyector festival (Madrid 2025). She is currently a resident studio artist at Tangent Projects studios.