10 Questions with Joana Pereira da Costa
Joana Pereira da Costa is a performance-based multidisciplinary artist whose work unfolds at the intersection of body, memory, and resistance. Drawing upon lived experience, feminist philosophy, and poetic inquiry, her practice engages performance as both method and metaphor, a space where the self is simultaneously deconstructed and reassembled. For Joana, the body is not merely a subject of representation but an active, thinking agent: a site of rupture and revelation, inscribed with personal and political histories.
Joana Pereira da Costa - Portrait
Her performances often operate as intimate acts of witnessing, where language gives way to gesture, and presence becomes a provocation. Through the careful orchestration of sensory elements, particularly smell, texture, and sound, Joana subverts the ocular-centric traditions of Western art, reawakening neglected modes of perception as tools of knowledge and empathy. These sensorial interventions are not ornamental; they are critical strategies that expand the audience’s capacity to feel, to remember, and to reimagine.
Working across live performance, moving image, and installation, Joana’s work meditates on the tension between exposure and concealment, structure and chaos, silence and articulation. It often inhabits liminal spaces, between theatre and gallery, public and private, trauma and transformation, seeking to make visible the invisible architectures that govern female experience.
Baptism, Photography, 2025 © Joana Pereira da Costa
INTERVIEW
Please share a bit about your artistic journey. What first drew you to performance, and how did your studies and background shape your practice?
My artistic journey began in fashion. I was fascinated by its ability to shape identity, frame the body, and communicate through form and texture without using words. But over time, I started noticing its limitations, how garments often work as surfaces that conceal rather than reveal. That pushed me to question not just what we wear, but the body itself: how it performs, resists, and holds memory. From there, my practice shifted naturally from designing around the body to exploring the body as material, as space, and as language, an embodied text that is both written upon and capable of writing back.
Your work spans performance, moving image, and installation. How do you decide which medium best suits a particular idea, and what do you gain from working across different forms?
I follow my instincts and the direction my body points me toward. When I begin a new project, I first ask myself what I want the audience to take away from it, and instinctively, the medium emerges from that intention. I don’t believe in setting strict boundaries between forms; each offers a distinct way of communicating. Performance gives me intimacy: the power to break the fourth wall and invite the audience into a shared space. Installation allows the audience to step into the work itself, blurring the boundaries between subject and object, viewer and performer. Moving image, on the other hand, gives me the ability to suspend and manipulate time, capturing fleeting moments in a way that the other media cannot. Working across these forms expands the language of my practice, ensuring that each idea finds its most honest and impactful expression.
A Scent’s Caress, Scents, 2025 © Joana Pereira da Costa
You often describe the body as a “thinking agent.” How do you translate that philosophy into the way you prepare, structure, or perform your works?
For me, describing the body as a “thinking agent” means trusting it as more than just a vessel; it’s a site of knowledge, memory, and intuition. In preparing a work, I often begin not with theory or script, but with physical exploration: gestures, movements, or even stillness that emerge instinctively. I let my body lead before language or structure comes in. In performance, I think of the body as both archive and storyteller: it carries lived experience, but it also generates new ways of knowing in real time with the audience. Allowing the body to “think” in this way keeps my work alive, unpredictable, and deeply connected to presence.
Feminist thought and poetic inquiry are central to your practice. In what ways do they inform your work and creative process?
Feminist thought shapes my work by encouraging me to question the systems that frame and discipline the body, especially the female body. It gives me a critical lens to uncover how power operates through language, gaze, and cultural expectations, while also offering strategies of resistance. Poetic inquiry enters as the way I respond: rather than simply exposing these structures, I seek to reimagine them through metaphor and sensorial experience. Together, feminism and poetry allow me to approach art not just as critique, but as a space for re-writing narratives, where the personal and political meet, and where new forms of vulnerability and strength can be articulated.
Speaking of the creative process, what is it like? How do you go from the first idea to the outcome?
My creative process often begins with something I read, see, or experience that provokes me. I start by writing about it in an informal, almost stream-of-consciousness way, as a way of sorting through my thoughts. When I revisit these notes, I instinctively begin to imagine how the experience could be translated into something felt, rather than told, how the audience might step into that perspective through the body, the senses, or the atmosphere of the work. I often draw from autobiographical fragments, not to centre myself, but because the personal can open a pathway to the universal. By grounding my practice in lived experience, I aim to illuminate structures that shape many women’s lives, inviting connection, recognition, and empathy, not just for me, but for the wider realities that my story touches. From there, the medium and form follow naturally, guided by the emotional truth I want to convey.
Pillow Talk, Installation, 2025 © Joana Pereira da Costa
Pillow Talk, Installation, 2025 © Joana Pereira da Costa
How has your creative process evolved over time, and what challenges continue to shape your practice?
My practice has been gradually shifting from the performance art sphere into the realm of theatre. In performance art, I was drawn to immediacy and viscerality. Theatre, however, has opened up new possibilities for narrative, collaboration, and dramaturgy, while still allowing me to hold onto the embodied qualities of performance. This evolution has challenged me to think more deeply about structure, character development, and duration, and how to sustain an audience’s attention over time without losing the rawness that first defined my practice. One of the ongoing challenges is finding a balance between experimentation and accessibility: how to remain true to the conceptual and sensory depth of my work, while also creating spaces that invite wider audiences in. This tension continues to shape my process and push me toward new forms of expression.
Your performances engage smell, texture, and sound as critical strategies. Could you talk about how you approach these sensory layers, and what role they play in shaping the audience’s experience?
I approach sensory layers as extensions of language, tools that allow me to communicate beyond words. Smell, texture, and taste bypass the purely intellectual and reach the body directly, evoking memory, desire, and emotion in ways that images alone cannot. By layering these elements, I create spaces where the audience doesn’t just observe but participates bodily in the work. For me, these senses destabilise the hierarchy of vision in art, opening up a more intimate, visceral encounter, one that makes the experience both collective and deeply personal.
You’ve described performance as an “intimate act of witnessing.” What does this notion of witnessing mean to you, both as a performer and for those engaging with your work?
For me, witnessing is about feeling, and feeling is the ground of empathy. Through performance, I try to create situations where the audience is not just observing but participating, even if only sensorially. In that shared space, we become part of a microcosm where everyone encounters a sensation together. Witnessing, then, is not passive; it is an active, embodied form of recognition that dissolves distance and opens the possibility of genuine connection.
Untitled, Mixed Media, 2025 © Joana Pereira da Costa
Much of your practice unfolds in in-between spaces, between theatre and gallery, silence and articulation. What draws you to these thresholds, and what possibilities do they open up in your work?
I’m drawn to those thresholds because they offer different ways for audiences to engage with a work. In galleries, art can be highly conceptual and abstract, which encourages reflection but can also create distance from the body or the senses. Theatre, by contrast, often provides narrative and context, allowing the audience to inhabit a story and experience it more immediately. By moving between these spaces, I can explore multiple modes of engagement, inviting both contemplation and embodied participation, while creating works that resonate on different levels for diverse audiences.
Lastly, what themes, questions, or projects are you currently exploring, and where do you see your work moving in the near future?
Currently, I’m developing A Scent’s Caress, a play I wrote and am directing, which explores intimacy, memory, and the ways the body registers presence through smell. I’m developing it in collaboration with Antonia Franceschi, director and producer, and part of this work involves experimenting with how different media can exist in dialogue; for instance, I’m exploring a musical conversation between classical music and Portuguese fado.
Looking ahead, I see my practice moving increasingly toward collaborative work that brings together multiple forms, performance, installation, sound, and visual art, to create layered, immersive experiences. I’m interested in exploring how these dialogues between mediums can expand the ways audiences encounter and feel a work, making space for new forms of reflection and engagement.
Artist’s Talk
Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a curated promotional platform that offers artists the opportunity to articulate their vision and engage with our diverse international readership through insightful, published dialogues. Conducted by Mohamed Benhadj, founder and curator of Al-Tiba9, these interviews spotlight the artists’ creative journeys and introduce their work to the global contemporary art scene.
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