Crossroads
mix-media, interactive site-specific installation
This work was created during the Quimera II art residency at Liberarte – Atelier de Artes (Associação pela Arte) in Palhais, Portugal. 7/2026
It is a map of time, memory, reflection, and aspiration. A living chart of Barreiro and Palhais, where every point is a collision of exploitation and solidarity, a crossroads of destruction and resistance.
The rose compasses mark the concentration of these opposing forces: the shipyards and factories that built empires, the workers' neighbourhoods that fuelled them, the polluted land and water that bore their cost, and the public spaces reclaimed by those who refused to be erased.
Here, history is not a line but a battlefield. The Age of Discoveries expanded the world, but at the price of colonised lands and the enslavement of their people. Barreiro’s docks sheltered the ships that carried both ambition and oppression across oceans, while "The Royal Complex of Vale de Zebro" factory produced the main staple food for the fleets, using enslaved people as its main workforce.
Later, the railway expansion spurred industrial growth, including cork factories from Victor Garrelon's early cork factory to ESENCE, the last to close (2008). Yet, these industries kept workers poorly educated and impoverished. The industrial giant CUF built its chemical manufacturing empire nearby, pumping chemicals into the Tagus, turning its waters lifeless and its skies to acid. This destroyed local fishing and agricultural businesses, while workers toiled under a dictatorship that called it progress.
Yet, in every historical chapter of the area, solidarity persisted. It lived in the first slave brotherhoods of Barreiro and Palhais, in the strikes of CUF and cork workers alike and in the assemblies that fought oppression and won back the streets after the Carnation Revolution.
Now, the same land is being claimed again, not by the people, but by capital. The two rose compasses marked "Future?" point out the gentrified zones, where the weight of history is being paved over by boutique facades and rising rents.
You are invited to claim your space in the redefinition of this area. Every flag on this map is a demand, and an act of claiming.
Can claiming space become public power?
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Jigsaw Puzzle game
Froso Papadimitriou & Sara Karin Fisher
A participatory puzzle for a fundraising event towards an artist run space. The visitors were given a piece of the puzzle to draw and paint on it.
When all pieces were filled the puzzle was assembled on the wall and the visitors were encourage to continue adding more drawings and colours.
This project was made for the minesweeper benefit in 2016
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Secrets in a bottle…
Froso Papadimitriou, Josh Plough and Teresa
Based on the definition of community as “a social unit of any size that shares common values”, this project looked at the often convoluted social exchanges and relationships between the different members of a close community.
Does a secret remain a secret once it’s told? This project explores the paths of communications and the way that thoughts/beliefs/agreements and disagreements circulate within a commune and how they shape the conditions and roles of its members.
Using the ephemeral way of communication with a message in a bottle, we created a metaphor of how secrets within close communities can circulate, in cases randomly and uncontrolled, like a bottle in the ocean that’s course is unpredictable. In addition the physicality of the action of writing, which is a unique characteristic to the individual, parallels the trace that follows a secret and eventually leads back to the source.
The visitors were invited to pick up a bottle with A4 paper inside and a pen and write a message/ secrets/thoughts/feelings/experiences etc. that relates to whatever community means to them. Then they had to hand the bottle to whomever they choose in the space to repeat the action. Once the paper was filled the last person, who entered their message, had to bring it back to the starting point. The papers were displayed at the end in the gallery space, where the visitors can read the secrets.
This project was made for the Open Warehouse Fountain road in 2015.
 secret in a bottle |  secret in a bottle |
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The island of Wonder
Sara Karin Fisher & Froso Papadimitriou
Draw and colour in project for the clients at Christmas Crisis Homeless shelter 2015.
We invited visitors to use their fantasy, pick and design their selected area on the map. The final result aimed to create a collective tapestry made by each visitors imagination.
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