SELF-UNCENSORED #3 [UnCoding] Jan 2026 | TBA

SELF-UNCENSORED [UnCoding]

Ana Borralho (n. 1972, Lagos) e João Galante (n. 1968, Luanda) são artistas portugueses com um percurso singular e transdisciplinar que cruza artes visuais, performance, teatro, dança e som. Trabalham em parceria desde 2001, criando obras que se distinguem pela experimentação formal, implicação ética e política e pela estreita relação com o público. A sua prática artística coloca o corpo como lugar de interrogação e como ferramenta crítica em relação aos sistemas sociais, culturais e económicos.

Ambos têm formação em artes visuais e performativas: Ana estudou escultura no Ar.Co e João pintura e dança no Forum Dança, tendo trabalhado com diversos coreógrafos e encenadores da cena contemporânea portuguesa. Integraram o grupo OLHO (1992-2002), dirigido por João Garcia Miguel, como atores e cocriadores.

Juntos, criaram projetos como Mistermissmissmister (2002), sexyMF (2007), World of Interiors (2010), Atlas (2011), Gatilho da Felicidade (2012) e Manual de Instruções (2016), apresentados em importantes festivais e instituições em países como França, Alemanha, Brasil, Japão, Escócia, Suíça, Áustria, Finlândia, Eslováquia e Eslovénia. A sua obra articula frequentemente práticas colaborativas e participativas, questionando estruturas de poder, identidade e comunidade.

Fundaram e dirigem a estrutura artística casaBranca, com sede em Lagos, e são os diretores artísticos do Festival Verão Azul, projeto transdisciplinar de criação e difusão contemporânea no sul de Portugal. Em 2024, lançaram a Escola Verão Azul, um programa de formação em artes performativas. Além da criação artística, dedicam-se à curadoria, pedagogia e articulação com o território, afirmando uma prática comprometida com a descentralização, diversidade e ecologia cultural.

Emmanuel Ndefo (b. 1991, Kano, Nigeria) is a multidisciplinary choreographer, performance artist, and researcher whose work explores the body as both tool and site of inquiry. He engages the broad metaphor of “hacking,” conceiving the human body as a network or system in which experiences circulate as data — vulnerable to disruption, corruption, and transformation. By probing these vulnerabilities, he opens spaces of rupture, devotion, and new discovery, revealing how performance can activate wider contemporary conversations.
Rooted in dance, performance, photography, film, and installation, Ndefo’s practice navigates the intersections of ritual and subversion within African performance traditions. He combines his formal training as a dance anthropologist with embodied knowledge from practising traditional African rituals and dances, alongside urban movement cultures such as hip‑hop, krump, and house. Working within this overlap of forms, he creates hybrid projects that interrogate how bodies negotiate history, technology, and power.
Ndefo was awarded the ACF African Culture Fund (2019) and the African No Filter Storytellers Fund (2021). Notable works include “Moving Between”, "Traces of Ecstasy” and “Adamma”. His research and performances have been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (2022), Centre National de la Danse, Paris (2017), Tate Modern, London (2019), Transformatorio Festival, Sicily (2018), TanzNet Dresden (2021), Villa Karo, Benin Republic (2022), Berlin Biennale (2022), Nordic Summer University, Oslo (2022), Kampnagel, Hamburg (2023), KunstWerk Köln (2023), PACT Zollverein, Essen (2023), Turku New Performance Biennale, Finland (2023), and RAID Festival, Salerno (2023), among others.

Isabél Zuaa é uma artista multidisciplinar, nascida em Lisboa, com origens angolanas e guineenses. A sua prática parte de dramaturgias em que corpos como o seu têm centralidade e protagonismo, propondo narrativas em que presença, identidade e memória se entrelaçam. Através do objeto artístico como arquivo vivo, convoca biografias e referências para gerar questionamentos expansivos. Em 2019, fundou o coletivo AURORA NEGRA juntamente com Cleo Diára e Nádia Yracema. O grupo estreou-se no TNDM II com Aurora Negra (2020), seguindo-se COSMOS (2022) e Missão da Missão (2023) no Teatro do Bairro Alto. Criaram também o Festival KILOMBO, cuja primeira edição decorreu no Espaço Alkantara (2021) e a segunda no Teatro São Luiz (2023), em parceria com o Festival Alkantara.
Isabél é cofundadora da UNA - União Negra das Artes. Foi destacada na POWERLIST 2021 e 2022 da BANTUMEN como uma das 100 personalidades mais influentes da Lusofonia.

Jana Shostak (born in 1993 in Grodno, Belarus) is a conceptual / tactical artist who become a help activist in 2020. Currently, she lives and works in Warsaw, and has a PhD in visual art. Since 2016, she has consciously used mass media as a tool to disseminate her art/activism.
She has won several awards for combining art and activism.
Since 2020, she has co-created the ephemeral memorial Minute of Scream for Belarus every day at 6 pm (until the end of the revolution and for one more day, in different ways), which has received universal recognition.
For this performance, she has been labelled an extremist by the Belarusian regime.

Mohammad Abbasi (born in 1977 in Shiraz, Iran) is an actor, dancer, choreographer, video artist, and festival director whose work explores the intersections of performance, activism, and embodied research.
He studied theatre directing at the University of Tehran, where he also performed in several productions with the Mehr Theatre Group. Abbasi created his first choreographic work, Recall Your Birthday, at the Fadjr Festival in 2003. From 2008 to 2010, he studied contemporary dance at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, France.
After returning to Iran, he founded the Invisible Centre of Contemporary Dance in Tehran, supporting independent dance in a context where the art form remains largely unofficial. In 2011, he launched the UNTIMELY Solo Dance Festival, which showcased works by emerging Iranian choreographers alongside international productions from Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Zurich.
Since 2008, Abbasi has also been active as a dance filmmaker. His film I AM MY MOTHER has been screened internationally and has received multiple awards.
As an educator, Abbasi has led more than 150 workshops in cities such as Tehran, Shiraz, Sanandaj, Hashtgerd, Marvdasht, Munich, Leuven, Berlin, Geneva, and Izmir.
His work is often politically charged, addressing cultural restrictions surrounding dance in Iran and using artistic activism to question and challenge systems of authority.

Sepideh Khodarahmi is an Iranian-Swedish artist based in Portugal and Sweden. She studied at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg, the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Amsterdam (Amsterdam University of the Arts), and the Broadway Dance Center in New York. Since 2016, she has been exploring drag as both a form of performance and a pedagogical tool, engaging with themes such as destruction, cakesitting, hypergender, eroticism, intimacy, queerness, and power. In her work, sensuality appears as both a recurring element and a method. Sepideh has collaborated with Marina Abramović, Hooman Sharifi, and Dinis Machado, and has performed on prestigious stages such as The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon. She also took part in PACAP (the Advanced Programme of Creation in Performing Arts) with Meg Stuart at Forum Dança in Lisbon.