Thinking through landscape joins the urge to care for our environments with the shaping of the spaces we inhabit. The approach initiated by Projeto Entre Serras (PES) aims to address those two inseparable dimensions of what is commonly referred to as territory. This approach is both political and aesthetic. Through images, visual arts, and other artistic practices, PES intends to serve as a tool for research and action across mountain regions that share both similarities and singularities, regardless of administrative borders.
Geomorphology has a profound influence on human life: altitude and slope create microclimates that shape food production, constrain mobility, and give rise to biodiversity hotspots. Mountains, by their very nature, tend to be places of low human density — vast, resilient spaces where the relationship between humans and the environment is both fragile and deeply intertwined. In the space between the rural flight of the past and today’s resurgent attraction to the land, mountains offer both a vantage point and a metaphor for examining the ecological challenges confronting contemporary society. In the light of postmodernity and the climate crisis, PES (literally “project between mountains”) envisions a contemporary art network focused on mountain areas — one that reflects on how we affect, and are in turn affected by, the ecosystems to which we belong. Rooted in contemporary art, the project conducts a form of inquiry into territories 1, seeking to spark dialogue and foster new forms of solidarity across coherent territorial frameworks that weave together urban and rural realities
This Project emerged from a personal history and from artistic and academic exchanges between France, Portugal, and Brazil, initiated as early as 2005.
At the heart of PES lies the question of landscape, understood in its broadest sense. Landscape is an exchange. To inhabit is to give and to receive, and this implies a circulation between all living beings. Sharing a common territory means shaping spaces grounded in a symbiotic socio-economic balance. Landscape reflects the way we live, the way we eat, the way we move. It is, as Gilles Tiberghien reminds us, a passage — a crossing 2. It is also made of memories, imaginations, and dreams 3. For Francesco Careri, inhabiting means appropriating and inscribing ourselves into space 4.
The Iberian Peninsula is divided in two by a mountain range that crosses the border between Portugal and Spain: here was a depopulated region that allowed PES to pursue an international dimension. Lack of fundings, though, meant that we had to start in Portugal only: PES was officially launched in 2017, supported by the PROVERE and PORTUGAL 2020 programmes through the Municipality of Fundão, the iNature Consortium, and ADXTUR. From 2017 to 2023, PES established an annual edition in Portugal — each year welcoming international artists and returning, always, to the theme of landscape. It started exploring four Portuguese mountains, Serra da Estrela, Serra do Açor, Serra das Mesas and Serra da Gardunha, looking at living environments and the notion of inhabiting. So was the start of this contemporary art network across mountain territories.
PES is rooted in the idea that societies function like rhizomes — as networks called to collaborate towards a shared future. It seeks to explore and propose concrete solutions for the habitability of villages in the 21st century 5. In this perspective, contemporary art becomes a symbolic, social, and territorial lever — a catalyst for connection and experimentation. Inviting artists to work with the territory enables a sensitive reading of place. In villages, this means welcoming artists as field researchers, attentive to linking art with landscapes, inhabitants, the economy, agriculture, and biodiversity.
At last, in 2023, support from the Creative Europe programme of the European Commission enabled PES to expand onto an international scale. Portugal and Spain were naturally bound; France entered the project through Carlos Casteleira, PES curator, personal connection to the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, where he presently teaches photography. PES has since been creating pathways between the rural mountain territories of these three European countries.
PES has been in the field uninterruptedly since 2017.
- Meaux Danièle, Enquêtes. Nouvelles formes de photographie documentaire (Landebaëron: Filigranes, 2019). ↩︎
- Tiberghien Gilles A, Le paysage est une traversée (Marseille: Parenthèse, 2020). ↩︎
- Perec Georges, Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Seuil, 2022). ↩︎
- Careri Francesco, Walkscapes: la marche comme pratique ethétique (Arles: Actes Sud, 2012). ↩︎
- Izquierdo Vallina, Jaime; Una nueva economía para la aldea del siglo XXI, (Oviedo: KRK ediciones, 2025). ↩︎
