Considering trauma as both an individual and collective response and consequence, the Ukrainian artist Maria Proshkovska develops a new process-oriented project that reflects the potential for healing and habilitation. Proshkovska works with time, materiality, and memory, inviting the viewer to reflect on the (im)possibility of returning to a “blank page.” She fills the surface of the canvas centimeter by centimeter with an ordinary pencil—granting viewers the choice of leaving this trace on paper or only in memory. This repetitive cycle of creation and erasure ceases to be a singular gesture and transforms into an exhausting bodily practice of existing within the tension between memory and its erasure.

An additional layer within the performance is the historical context of the location. The ruins of the monastery on the slopes of Varatojo near Torres Vedras have, at different periods, served not only as a place of prayer and solitude, but also as a refuge—a space of protection for those in need of shelter and support. For centuries, human actions and decisions have shaped an environment where vulnerability was not concealed, but accepted as part of the human experience.

Today, having lost its original function, this space retains its memory. Through artistic reinterpretation, it acquires new meaning, transforming into a site of a contemporary ritual. Proshkovska’s performance activates this continuity: the act of monotonous creation and erasure becomes a secular form of collective prayer, a gesture of attentiveness to pain and to hope, which is never entirely lost. A sonnet carved into the wall of the chapel Ermida de Santa Margarida, describing the transformation of cold stone into living flesh through an unextinguished inner fire, becomes a conceptual parallel to the performance: transformation here is understood not as destruction, but as a process in which a trace does not disappear, but shifts into another state.

An important element of the performance is the invitation extended to the Ukrainian community in Portugal, many of whom arrived in search of refuge, carrying with them experiences of forced displacement, broken ties, and rebuilding life from ashes in a new place. At the same time, the local community— for whom this space forms part of the everyday landscape of memory—will also be engaged. Together, they become not only spectators but co-authors of the performance, as carriers of memory—living archives for whom erasure and return, forgetting and remembering, are part of daily existence.

Through interaction with a community united by shared experience, the former monastery space reactivates its historical function. For the artist, working with local context becomes a way of creating a sensitive dialogue between different experiences of trauma and survival. Through memory—both personal and collective—the performance restores hope as a shared, ongoing, and open process, in which traces do not vanish but transform.

Outcome: a process-oriented, long-duration performative practice, an object, video documentation, and a sound recording. In her practice, Proshkovska often engages with the ideas of the invisible, the vanished, the durational, and the displaced. Each subsequent performance in a new location will add a newly recorded sound, gradually forming a multilayered audio work as a testimony to an ongoing process. The first sound, recorded in the ruins of the Portuguese monastery on the slopes of Varatojo, will become the foundation of a new long-term project in the artist’s practice, while the location itself will act as a full co-author of the artwork.