Though the colonial era has formally ended, its legacies continue to shape the way gender is constructed — through space, behaviour and embodied roles that persist in everyday life.

Anchored in the fishing village of Santana, on São Tomé, the project observes how inherited structures of power manifest in daily life. Gendered childhoods are one example: while boys play freely in groups, girls are often expected to assist their mothers with domestic work — 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 play, 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 were reworked into drawings, sculptures, video and large-scale paintings on linen. While the drawings register everyday gendered realities, the other works offer a subtle yet subversive vision: emerging figures of girls absorbed in play traditionally 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, participation and relation.