Applications for the Flechada program have already been evaluated. Five young artists between the ages of 24 and 31 will receive funding of up to €10,000 each to organize their first solo exhibition.

Henrique J. Paris, Luzia Cruz, Mariana Tilly, Juliana Campos and Sofia Rocha were the artists who presented the five exhibition projects selected in the second edition of Flechada – Support Program for First Solo Exhibitions. The program aims to support young artists in their first solo exhibition, a moment considered crucial for their launch as professional artists.

The five young people will receive a funding grant from FLAD with a value of up to 10 thousand euros to organize a unique exhibition project in the places chosen and approved within the scope of the application, which you can learn about below.

Selected projects:

“High Air” | Henrique J. Paris

Bio: Henrique J Paris (2000) is a London-based artist-researcher whose work dissects philosophical, scenographic, and architectural frameworks in relation to modes of power [decretados], scenographic, and architectural frameworks in relation to modes of power [decretados], moral codes, and Christian discipleship. Her practice seeks to expand the boundaries between visuals and social architectures through a series of media such as image creation, installations, installations, performance, archive and sound composition as sites of proclamation, re-memory and testimony.

Location: Arte Pólon, Moita

Date: September 20, 2025 (start)

Curator: Nael D’Almeida

Synopsis: Alto Ar will be Henrique J. Paris’ first solo exhibition in Portugal, where he proposes a visual and spatial experience that includes chronologies, maps and symbols, in order to situate social mobilizations, streets and peripheral routes. The exhibition intervenes in the barriers between memory, imagination and vision, revisiting years lived in Vale da Amoreira and transforming this geography into the exhibition space itself — as a conjugated rupture and field of analysis.

J. Paris investigates everyday rhythms and forms of spatiality/performativity while interrogating colonial power structures. At the center of the exhibition is An Archive Choreography, a body of material gathered between 2000 and 2025, composed of architectural documents, images, multimedia installations, and original sound reverberations.

 

“Cosmogonies” | Juliana Campos

Bio: Juliana Campos (1995, São Paulo) graduated in Multimedia from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP). His artistic practice developed, from a very early age, in a close relationship with Architecture and Painting, resuming these problems such as the oppositions between rule-exception, repetition singularity; and the integration of chance and variations on regulatory lines, through a strong geometric component. These aspects are explored, from the installation works, where the spatial issue is addressed more directly, to the more pictorial works, where these problems reappear in the geometric play and in the dialoguing arrangement of forms in tension. In recent years, he has focused on the creation of fabric pieces, entirely handmade, incorporating mixed dyeing, cutting and pasting techniques, also involving a pictorial exploration around the shades and ink stains on fabric. He currently lives and works in Porto.

Venue: Mais Silva Gallery, Porto

Date: September 13 to November 1, 2025

Curation: to be announced soon

Synopsis: The exhibition Cosmogonies takes up a universe that has been mostly explored in individual pieces, in fabric, transposing it to an exhibition project that encompasses, in addition to these pieces, the spatial relationships between them, considering the exhibition space and the architectural elements that make it up as its extension. The exhibition will be conceived as a geography, a “place” made of relationships and singularities, to be traversed and inhabited in a sensitive way, without the imposition of explicit meanings or narratives. It is an invitation to a silent dialogue in which the pieces, the space and those who walk through it participate.

 

“FROM THE TITANIC TO THE SCREEN” | Luzia Cruz

Bio: Luzia Cruz (1997, Lisbon) is a visual artist who lives in Hamburg and Berlin. Her work focuses on the fragility of the social mechanisms that regulate technological development, in tension with the extraction of natural resources. Plastically, Luzia explores this tension through ways of accelerating degradation processes in various materials. She is doing a master’s degree in fine arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and is a scholarship holder of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Luzia has been co-founder and co-director of the EGEU Cultural Association since 2019.

Location: mono Lisboa, Lisbon

Date: to be announced soon

Curation: to be announced soon

Synopsis: How do symbols of domination – be they economic, cultural or technological – inform an understanding of collective memory? And what role do happiness and comfort play in political decision-making? FROM THE TITANIC TO THE SCREEN is an exhibition project inspired by the plays by Fiama Hasse Pais Brandao, censored during the Estado Novo and which proposes to analyze discourses and methodologies of authority, especially when disseminated through digital platforms and coaching practices. These discourses often rely on strategies that mix emotional persuasion, appeal to the legitimacy of authority figures, and the promise of unlimited success, creating a subtle and mostly oppressive power dynamic.

 

“EMOTION” | Mariana Tilly

Bio: Mariana Tilly (1995), artist. He lives between Lisbon and Basel. She did her MFA at IAGN FHNW, Basel, where she is now a PhD student in Art and Cultural Studies. Recent exhibitions include Private Property (Belocampo, Lisbon), Galerie Lange-Pult (Auvernier), Kiefer Hablitzel Göhner Kunstpreis (Swiss Art Awards, Basel), PLATTFORM22 (Kunsthalle Palazzo, Basel).

Location: Carpintarias de São Lázaro, Lisbon

Date: to be announced soon

Curator: Pedro Barateiro (Spirit Shop)

Synopsis: EMOTION, curated by Spirit Shop, will be a solo exhibition by Mariana Tilly at Carpintarias de São Lázaro in Lisbon, at the end of 2025. Starting from an irresistible attachment to vision, the exhibition will articulate the representational complexities of mediated images, paying special attention to their processes of attribution of symbolic and historical value (in the media) and to their fabrication, revealing the author’s desires and sensibilities (in narrative cinema). This approach to modes of representation seeks to highlight and subvert visual perceptions, re-appropriating visual pleasure and “gaze” as a generous practice—one that highlights the incessant fascination with the power of images as vehicles of life, emotion, knowledge, violence, and justice—in all its aspects, and how these modes can serve necessary representations (of the “other”, of themselves, of communities and how they have been represented throughout history).

 

“Thunder Perfect Mind” | Sofia Rocha

Bio: Sofia Rocha, Azores, 1996. Degree in Fine Arts – Multimedia branch, from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. Master in Fine Arts, Intermedia branch, FBAUP. The work explores relationships between the Visible and the Invisible, energy exchanges, and alchemical processes. I seek to approach invisible phenomena, flows, and systems through material experimentation and speculative correspondences with three-dimensional forms,

Location: Espaço MIRA, Porto

Date: to be announced soon

Curatorship: Marta Espiridião

Synopsis: Thunder Perfect Mind prolongs a new mythology of symbols that merges dreams, projections and observations. By navigating the fine line between a metaphorical and poetic language and perceptions of the world, we find tools to visualize, physically express and experience immaterial phenomena. The organisms that inhabit the exhibition embody speculations about the universe, its nature and the functioning of the systems of flows and channels that permeate it. Starting from the visible world, they expand over it, in a movement that extends over the threshold of the perceptible to encompass more subtle phenomena. In the passage from the psychic interior to the sensible and visible world, the internal states of consciousness are transformed into external states of matter.

 

Congratulations and good work!