Wednesday 19 November 2025
Paloma Durante: The Watershed and Artists Make Space
Artist Paloma Durante participated in Artists Make Space in 2024-25, taking up residency in the Old Town Hall in Richmond. Here she writes about her experience of the programme and and her experience as an artist who moved from Brazil to the UK. Artists Make Space offers free studio space throughout the borough for artists to develop their practice.
Fado, 2021, Photograph, copyright Paloma Durante.
My life is now marked by a vast before and after, a line carved by immigration. In Portuguese, we call such a moment as a “divisor de águas” — literally, a “watershed.” Yet this divide is not a barrier, but a current that carries us toward transformation until one situation inevitably becomes another. The boundary is its own dissolution. Think of the meeting of river and sea, that instant when fresh water receives its first touch of salt: first the shiver, then it moves forward, still itself — yet othered.
And like a self-that-has-become-other, it takes time to discover not only the new form but also the continuities that managed to endure. For the river, becoming is movement; for me, water has become a metaphor for processes I don’t quite know how to name. Every day I revisit the remnants of that other life, seeing what from the hillside reaches the beach that I now am — a mixture of surprise and frustration at the unruliness of memory. As I forget a little of my own language, inner landscapes settle — openings, scars, and paths shaped by questions I have not yet been able to answer.
Rilke* taught me the importance of living with a question, and Barthes** the necessity of inscribing it in the world — one of life’s most beautiful lessons: some questions are not meant to be answered alone, and this is the reason of artistic languages. A dear friend once told me she would spend hours in her studio asking questions to all the materials she worked with. They answered in their own way — sometimes cooperative, sometimes temperamental — never closing a subject. What mattered most, she said, was not to forge an answer, but to live alongside these unexpected teachers. A kind of pedagogy of matter. It was also she who brought me the idea of the studio as a laboratory: a space for observation, coexistence, tests, notes, mistakes, and the discovery of things we were not necessarily looking for.
I brought few things when I moved. In one of the rooms of my old apartment I settle my home studio — a room of my own, inhabited by my writings, photographic experiments, dancing objects, and a cabinet full of ballet tights. My desk, my library, my walls covered with arrows and scribbles. Almost none of that came with me. What couldn’t exist as a digital file now lives in boxes in a closet at my mother’s house, on the other side of the Atlantic. Not to mention what I simply threw away. I’ve never been much of an archivist of myself.
My first studio in London was a notebook — and that’s a piece of advice I leave to anyone who wants to create and doesn’t have space: think of your notebook as a portable studio. I would write down, feverishly, ideas, images, and new English words; I glued petals and tiny scraps of paper. I started flirting with writing in two languages and began to see my texts as a cracked egg — a fractured potential. The ideas felt strange, as if they belonged to someone else. And they did. I had always been deeply connected to words, but suddenly they became more than a problem. Everything felt frayed, as if I no longer knew how to say what I wanted to say. It wasn’t just a problem of translation, but of transubstantiation.
For this reason, failure, error, inadequacy became recurring themes in my reflections, often through sketches, photos, and prints invaded by breadcrumbs and kiwi fuzz, since the kitchen counter was the space I had to experiment. I deeply believe that home can and should be a space for inventiveness, but there are limits to what can be done — especially when you don’t live alone. Alongside this negotiation with space came a deep sense of solitude while I tried to produce something. I come from practices rooted in collectivity, from works that happened alongside others. The reason I moved countries is a beautiful love story, but I hadn’t calculated the side effects, like the difficulty of establishing new relationships, since I didn’t come through a work or study context.
When I found myself alone and needing to share a process, I would go to museums to talk with paintings. I had wonderful conversations with Pissarro and Vanessa Bell; I visited Wael Shawky’s work and Muybridge’s photographs many times, and even shared thoughts with the mummies at the British Museum about how archaeology and the desecration of corpses are similar practices (dear Cleopatra, I would love to hear your thoughts on that). When I told this to a friend in a video call, she asked if I was alright. I could only laugh.
All of this is to say why being selected for the Artists Make Space residency was so important to me. To be honest, I have no victorious story. I’m still trying to understand what my practice has become. The project I proposed stemmed from a desire to work on a larger scale and to recover the expanded gesture of drawing. I failed and thank goodness I did. First, because by disobeying my own proposal, I rediscovered that pedagogy of materials that had become so dear to me, starting from broken eggs. And second, because the gesture itself, guided by the image of the eggshell, revealed that within those lines lived not only an image but a brand new possibility of writing — and with it, an entire and honest process was born.
* Rainer Maria Rilke was an Austrian poet and novelist.
** Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist and philosopher.
Fado #1, 202, Still from performance, copyright Paloma Durante.
During my Artists Make Space studio hours I was able to test this writing, invent a way of reading it. I had floor, walls, mobility, experiments settling on the table again without worrying about packing everything away at the end of the day. When I returned, the thoughts from the previous day had doubled in size, like bread dough. It’s hard to explain to anyone who doesn’t work professionally with creative processes the importance of having a space where things can happen, a place to finally unfold the pages of a notebook. And all of this happening alongside two colleagues who, also selected to the residency program, by happy coincidence, worked with poetics of rupture and reparation — whether in theme or materiality. Three people working with fragments and fragilities, seeking to bring forth new forms from it. Fellow artists to whom I devote all my gratitude for the meaningful conversations and insights by the shared afternoons in the studio.
Because of the Artists Make Space residency I could reconnect and rediscover new paths for my practice, including rebuilding a sense of belonging to a community. It was possible to weave relationships, meet artists and practitioners who are exploring ways of making and thinking art, have a space to invite people to talk, exchange, experiment, and simply be together. I could share what I was producing and receive generous support from the organizers of Artists Make Space to think about the next steps in my practice. I remember that in my application, I wrote about my interest in joining the programme to build a network. And this, I can happily say, truly happened.
Once again, mine is not the story of someone already triumphant, but of someone still finding her way. It was a nine months’ period, like a gestation, during which I was invited to develop my practice freely. The commitment was discovering how to activate, “make space” in a studio practice. I was, and still am, discovering.
Fado #2, 2021, Still from performance, copyright Paloma Durante.