Opening, Performance – Artists: Barbara Portailler, Roberta Goldfarb

Verso Gallery presents the opening of an exhibition by Roberta Goldfarb in dialogue with the practice of Barbara Portailler, bringing together two artists whose work converges around questions of memory, displacement, and belonging within the urban landscape. About In dialogue with Édouard Glissant’s reflections on the right to opacity and with the sense of belonging evoked by Adília Lopes in Estar em casa, the exhibition proposes thinking of home not as transparency or a fixed origin, but as something continuously shaped through relationships. Drawing from different experiences of migration and of building a life in Lisbon, both artists approach inhabiting not as a fixed place, but as a space of listening, negotiation, and relational construction. The exhibition reflects on what it means to live in a city, to create bonds, and to reclaim forms of shelter, belonging, and return. Participation is central to Roberta Goldfarb’s practice. Her recent work brings together memory, writing, and repetition as forms of collective reflection. As an immigrant, the artist began carving doors and windows into fragments of Portuguese pavement stone, transforming them into small houses—minimal gestures that affirm belonging and evoke the right to return. In dialogue with Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation—the possibility of imagining stories that could not be told or preserved in the archive—women’s stories are inscribed on typed sheets of paper, while the image of the house reappears as a recurring symbol of shelter and vulnerability. Read more Toggle Performance / Live Art