liquid memories

Queer Paper Gardens

— artistic research, botanical collage, and queer feminist genealogies

Collage / Queer and feminist histories / Artists’ books / Video-essay / Installation

Queer Paper Gardens is an artistic research project developed through a close collaboration between paula roush and maria lusitano, articulated through an artist’s book, a multi-channel video installation, and a constellation of exhibitions, publications, and public programmes. The project explores collage as a queer and feminist cultural practice, linking travel, collecting, and montage as modes of critical knowledge production in contemporary art.

The research traces collage practices across three centuries, beginning with Mary Delany’s botanical paper collages(1772–1782), often considered a foundational instance of collage on paper. It moves through Victorian photographic collage and culminates in the modernist collage-novels that form the conceptual fulcrum of the project: Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) by Max Ernst and Dons des Féminines (1951) by Valentine Penrose.

Through these genealogies, Queer Paper Gardens situates collage as a practice of association, desire, displacement, and resistance, foregrounding its role within queer and feminist imaginaries.

Project unfolding

The project materialised through a constellation of formats: an artist’s book, a collage salon installation, two double-screen video-essays, and two large-scale charcoal drawings. These elements formed a spatial and conceptual environment in which historical research, visual montage, and speculative reading converged.

The work was presented in exhibition contexts in Lisbon and London, where installation, publication, and moving image operated together as interdependent research outputs rather than discrete works.

Research focus

The project addresses:

collage as a queer and feminist methodology
historical genealogies of collage across three centuries
travel, collecting, and montage as cultural practices
surrealist and modernist collage-novels
the relationship between image, text, and desire

Methodology: archive, fabulation, and publishing

The archive is activated through:

workshops and participatory labs
editorial and curatorial experiments
writing as situated practice
teaching and collective discussion

Publishing operates not as documentation, but as method — a spatial and temporal extension of the research itself.

From Practice to Manifesto

Queer Paper Gardens operates within msdm as an ongoing research terrain where collage functions simultaneously as material practice, critical method, and editorial strategy. The project activates associative thinking, montage, and non-linear reading as modes of working across image, text, and space.

Collage is mobilised here as a way of assembling relations rather than producing fixed narratives, allowing feminist and queer genealogies to remain open, situated, and in motion. Through publishing, installation, moving image, and pedagogy, the project sustains a mode of practice in which making, thinking, and editing unfold together.

→ Read the msdm manifesto

Forms / Outputs (selected)

Publications & editorial projects

Artist’s book

– Queer Paper Gardens or the Wildlife of Symbols
Lisbon: Fundação EDP

Related publication
– A Field (of Interconnected Realities)
London: msdm publications

Video-essay

– Queer Paper Gardens

Exhibitions & Installations (Selected)
– Queer Paper Gardens (Estranhos Jardins de Papel) — Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon
– Dreaming Through – On & Into the Exotic — 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London

Texts and critical writing

– Queer Paper Gardens or the Wildlife of Symbols —
I. Les deux amies / The Two Girlfriends (Gifts of the Feminine)
II. The mise-en-scène of the unconscious (A Week of Goodness)
III. The photo album in the drawing room (Cardomania), the album of Madame B.
IV. The paper mosaic (Female cruising in the garden)
paula roush & maria lusitano, Queer Paper Gardens: Roman, Lisbon: Fundação EDP, 2013

– Minar o mundo circundante / To Mine the Surrounding World — João Pinharanda (exhibition curator’s statement)

– Colagem e Colisão — Celso Martins, Expresso Atual

– Mulheres fatais e outras que tais — Luísa Soares de Oliveira, Ípsilon / Público

– A Journal of One’s Own — Cristina Duarte, reflections on Queer Paper Gardens, Vol. V, Fundação EDP, 2013

– When Writing and Visual Arts Meet, Magic Can Happen — Wayne Burrows, Backlit Gallery meets Nottingham Writers’ Studio

Workshops & Public Programmes (Selected)
– Queer Paper Gardens: Exploring the Relationship Between Collage and Self-Publishing
Workshop for artists and educators, Fundação EDP, Lisbon

– Dreaming Through: Self-Publishing Workshop for Artists and Educators
Self-publishing workshop for artists and educators. Resulting works were showcased alongside the exhibition in street-facing displays at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London

– Queer Paper Gardens: Guided Visit to the Exhibition
The Lisbon Consortium, III Lisbon Summer for the Study of Culture Programme

– True Tales: Queer Artistic Strategies
With Ana Pérez-Quiroga, Patrícia Guerreiro, Paula Roush, Maria Lusitano, João Manuel de Oliveira, and Nuno Crespo
Part of hetero q.b. programme, National Museum of Contemporary Art – Chiado, Lisbon