not nor I was a spatial installation developed in 2024, composed of text, mirrors and movement. Words were placed on the walls of the gallery space during the Chester Photo Festival, arranged so that they could not be fully read from a single static position. Viewers had to move through the space in order to make meaning of the words. As their bodies moved, the sentences appeared, disappeared and recombined, producing different readings depending on where they stood. Meaning emerged through movement (literally). This spatial logic echoes my own experience of living across different places. As a Portuguese woman living in the UK, and having previously lived in the Netherlands and Canada, movement has shaped how I understand who I am, where I belong, and how I see the world around me.
The installation also included two large mirrors positioned directly opposite one another. This created the effect of two portals extending beyond the gallery itself, forming a continuous tunnel of reflections. The viewer became part of this visual field. Their body, the text and the surrounding space repeated within the mirrors, reinforcing the idea that identity is produced through relation and reflection.
On one of the mirrors, I placed hooks (1990) words: “Moving, changing, becoming - these are the conditions of our life”. They appear alongside my artist statement, which was also written on the mirror. To read the text, the viewer had to face their reflection in the mirror.
I wanted to explore the discomfort I feel while looking in a mirror, and I don't assume that everyone feels this way, but as an artist I wanted to lean into this multilayered, sometimes contradictory feeling of familiarity and estrangement.
On the mirrors, I also added the words “I am…” and left coloured markers, inviting viewers to become participants. Over time, the mirror filled with responses. As people added their words, it gradually became covered with statements, and as more appeared, voices began to overlap. The mirror became a layered field of words, reflections and gestures. What started as a personal statement transformed into a shared place where many stories were written, seen and held together.
Identity appears here as something relational rather than fixed, emerging through the presence of others and through the space we share together (Ahmed, 2006) - echoing feminist understandings that voice and subjectivity take shape collectively and often from the margins (hooks, 1990).
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As people moved through the space, they became part of the work. Not outside looking in, but within it. The idea was that as a human and as an artist I don't want to stand alone, because I only exist in relation to others.
The work therefore suggests that identity does not exist in isolation but takes shape through our presence with each other; who I am emerges in relation to those with whom I share space (Ahmed, 2006; hooks, 1990).
This participatory process marked an important step in the development of not nor, opening the work towards collaboration and collective forms of expression that would become central to the following stage.