The Coloniality of Gender is a research-based art project that examines how colonial histories continue to shape gender through spatial, behavioural and embodied structures — long after the formal end of colonisation.

Anchored in the fishing village of Santana, on São Tomé, the project observes how inherited structures of power manifest in everyday life. Gendered childhoods are one example: while boys play freely in groups, girls are often expected to assist their mothers with domestic tasks — quietly rehearsing roles shaped by centuries of labour division and social control.

In response, the participatory project O Mundo Imaginário created temporary space for play, imagination, and the rethinking of gender roles. Through storytelling, play, and tactile exploration, children were invited to imagine new relational possibilities beyond inherited roles. The project was developed in collaboration with the local community and supported by SOMA, an organisation committed to gender equality.

These experiences are reworked materially into drawings, bronze sculptures, video and large-scale paintings on raw linen. While the drawings register everyday gendered realities, the other works offer a quiet yet subversive vision: emerging figures of girls absorbed in play activities typically reserved for boys — climbing, building, resting, creating — seemingly at ease in spaces once shaped by exclusion.
Their presence unfolds in faint, monochrome gestures — as if surfacing from an unfinished future. A future in which imagination opens space for new forms of presence and relation.