Ânia Pais (São Miguel, Azores, 1998) lives and works between Atalaia (Covilhã) and Lisbon.
Ânia Pais’s practice emerges from a search for intimacy with that which constitutes her.
The land was the first body through which she learned this relationship.
Through it, she came to know love, hardship, loss, belonging and desire.
Her work begins with a simple question: what do we do with what we inherit?
Between the land where she grew up, gestures passed down through generations and the forms of life that surround her, she develops a practice that seeks to understand how we can respond to what constitutes us without simply reproducing it. Working across installation, sculpture, textiles, photography, performance and writing, she investigates the relationships that shape us and the possibility of imagining other ways of living.
Often drawing on family experiences, intergenerational knowledge and the rural landscape in which she grew up, her work moves away from an autobiographical or memorial approach. She is more interested in understanding what to do with the past than in preserving it. What we inherit emerges as living matter: a constellation of gestures, affections, knowledge, forms of violence and desires that continue to act in the present and demand a response.
In her works, fabrics are unravelled, objects dismantled, and structures displaced and reconstructed. This gesture does not seek to recover an origin or preserve intact what came before. It seeks to listen to it. To inhabit its contradictions. To discover how it might continue to live.
Although rooted in specific histories, her practice expands into broader questions of care, labour, freedom, belonging and justice. Her work seeks to draw closer to what we share: the relationships that sustain us, the invisible labour that makes a life possible, and the desire to exist more fully.
At the heart of her practice lies a conviction: people deserve more than survival. They deserve time to discover who they are, to love, to create, to make mistakes, to desire and to live fully. It is within this space between the world as it is and the world as it could be that her work finds its poetic and political force.