SOCIAL GREENHOUSE – S.O.
Transdisciplinary artistic practice exploring the potential of plastic as a material and sensory device through which Systemic Oppression can be investigated.
PhD in Artistic Creation
University of Aveiro
1 - SOCIAL GREENHOUSE – S.O.
Barcelona – Spain 2026
SOCIAL GREENHOUSE – S.O. is a transdisciplinary performance that uses the agricultural greenhouse as a device of control to investigate Systemic Oppression as the organizing structure of social life.
Just as a greenhouse regulates light, water, temperature, air circulation, and growing conditions, the Social Greenhouse operates through mechanisms that classify, organize, and precondition bodies, defining different possibilities of existence.
The performance establishes a dialogue between the properties of plastic—ubiquity, resistance, artificiality, toxicity, and suffocation—and the ways in which Systemic Oppression materializes in everyday life. In this context, plastic is not merely a material, but an element capable of making perceptible the logics that sustain and reproduce social hierarchies.
Within the Social Greenhouse, there are no bodies outside the structure. Everyone inhabits the same environment. Yet not everyone is given the same conditions to exist. Some receive more light, more water, and more space to grow. Others face restriction, pruning, containment, disposability, and disappearance.
Between body, matter, and space, SOCIAL GREENHOUSE – S.O. proposes, through the materiality of plastic, a reflection on the systems that regulate collective life and on the visible and invisible ways in which certain bodies are privileged, controlled, discarded, or eliminated within the same greenhouse.
AROUND, BETWEEN AND BEYOND
Brussels, Belgium – 2025
An exploratory performance born from the perception that, even when attempting to move beyond the dominant framework and understand the mechanisms of Systemic Oppression, it continues to operate around, between, and beyond bodies. The performance investigates precisely this place where Systemic Oppression continues to permeate relationships, spaces, atmospheres, and ways of existing, even when there is a critical awareness or an attempt to break away from it. Plastic expands this sense of continuous permanence, as something that never completely disappears.
Created with the support of Tango Factory and La Veine.
Participation: Flávia Morari and Vinicius Calamari.
A-GOSTO – 31 DAYS
Barcelona, Spain – 2025
Art-Passage depicts a process of artistic practice that traverses Systemic Oppression as both condition and environment.
Art-Passage depicts a process of artistic practice that traverses Systemic Oppression as both condition and environment. Developed over thirty-one consecutive days, the project stems from the idea that Systemic Oppression never takes a vacation. Without repetition or a fixed script, each performance emerged from the encounter between body, plastic, everyday life, and the present moment. Art-Passage is born from this continuous passage, understanding artistic creation as something that happens in the present and never returns in the same way, just as life itself.
THE NAME OF THE PLASTICIZED BODY
Barcelona, Spain – 2025
An exploratory performance born from the idea of disappearing in order to exist. The plasticized body dehumanizes the human figure. Thus, the artistic gesture becomes a way of seeing that, outside the dominant structure, certain bodies seem to occupy a field of perception only when they cease to exist as thinking subjects, protagonists, or legitimate bodies. Instead, becoming merely a plastic body, without identity or reference.
OPPRESSION IN SCULPTURE AND MONUMENT
Foz do Arelho, Portugal – 2024
An exploratory performance born from the unease provoked by sculptures and monuments scattered throughout cities, almost always associated with figures of the dominant structure, colonization, and systems of power. The action investigates who is allowed to be remembered, honored, or occupy space in the collective memory. On the beach, plastic, wind, and the body began to create ephemeral sculptures, monsters, and unstable images that make my own body appear even smaller in the face of the structure being formed.
© 2026 Vander de Souza WEB