Our Lady Who Burns / Nossa Senhora Que Queima, 2023

16mm video, sound, colour, 8'

Portugal’s Serra da Gardunha is a mountain known for the paranormal. Where before it was revered as a site of saintly apparitions, nowadays it is known for mysterious light sightings, with rumours of a UFO hangar hidden inside it. Atmospheric and dream-like, Our Lady Who Burns guides us through this mountain and an intergenerational lore of infatuations. In parallel, two friends lament the pregnancy of their old cat, speculating on whether the mystical energy of the mountain might be able to interrupt its gestation.

Shot on 16mm with an small and intimate crew, Our Lady Who Burns is a  voyage through the biographical landscape of the director, for whom the presence of the otherworldly, the geology of the territory, and a biography of unwanted bodily gestation are expressed through acts of cinematic apparitions. - Text by Foi Bonita a Festa

Written and Directed by Alice dos Reis

Sound Design and Mixing by Marcelo Tavares

Producer Cristiana Forte

Produced by Foi Bonita a Festa

With the support of Botín Foundation

Elementals 1, 2, 3, 4, 2023

Needle point embroidery, cotton thread, jute canvas

30 x 46,5 cm

Needle point embroidered pieces, each portraying the same landscape over various times of the day and seasons. The landscape, a mountain range in the center-north of Portugal where the artist's family lived for many generations, has long been known as a place of both paranormal sightings and religious apparitions. These myths have developed into claims that the mountain is hollow, concealing a UFO hanger inside. The use of embroidery in a strictly vertical stitch evokes a meditative repetition that allows for the mind to wander and attune itself to the preternatural, expanding upon the genealogical lexicons, and archetypal phenomena.

See You Later Space Island, 2022

HD Video, 16', Color, Sound

In the middle of the Atlantic, Helena rekindles an old friendship with Ceu, an astrophysicist who recently returned to the remote Azorean island of Santa Maria. Caught between the island’s geological inheritance and the vastness of the cosmos, the two friends reconcile different views and experiences regarding the island’s rapid development as a staging ground for multiple space exploration technologies and infrastructures. A work of speculative-fiction inspired by the island’s current investment in space resources, See You Later Space Island is a loose tale of friendship and endurance in the face of ecological subsidence in the age of multi-planetary engendering.

Main Credits

Produced by Cristiana Forte, Alice dos Reis / Production Assistants Stella Garcia Nevena Desivojevic / Directed by Alice dos Reis / Starring Bia Wong, João Abreu / Assistant Director André Silva Santos / Director of Photography Manuel Pinho Braga / 1st Assistant Photography César Rocha / 2nd Assistant Photography Ana Ramos / Sound Director Marcelo Tavares / Edited by Helena Estrela, Mário Espada, Alice dos Reis / Sound Editing and Mixing Marcelo Tavares / Color Correction Rita Lamas / VFX Márcio Pité / Comissioned by Walk & Talk Arts Festival / With the Support of Câmara Munincipal de Vila do Porto, Governo dos Açores: Direção Regional do Turismo e Direção Regional da Cultura, Walk & Talk Arts Festival, Galeria Municipal do Porto, Mondriaan Fonds, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian / With Special Thanks to Marta Espiridião

For a Life Long Disease of Copper, 2021

Exhibition at Kunsthalle Lissabon
Photos © Bruno Lopes

Sprung from the artist’s own family history, For a Life Long Disease of Copper extrapolates the media of essay-film and sci-fi drama to both recount and fictionalize their grandmother’s life story as a worker at a pharmaceutical factory in Lisbon during the 1960s and 1970s where, among other pharmaceuticals, she fabricated the company’s first birth-control pill.

For the works in the exhibition, Alice dos Reis undertook archival research into the development of hormonal and non-hormonal contraceptives throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, intertwined with their grandmother’s personal testimony, trying to investigate the complicated relationships between birth control, gender, class, extractivism, and technoscience.

For a Life Long Disease of Copper is a fictional interview with the artist’s grandmother, played by a digitally aged version of the artist themselves. Occupying very entangled personal, biographical, historical and political positions, dos Reis asks (and answers) some questions about their grandmother’s life as a pharmaceutical factory worker. Poems, archival images, and filters weave together, giving birth to a new sci-fi scenario paved by ano dois, ano dez, ano duzentos, a series of large- scale images of outer space in which asteroids and gravitating copper IUDs meet, speaking to a speculative reality where space-extracted copper is used to fabricate contraceptives. A work uniform from the time dos Reis’s grandmother worked at the pharmaceutical is framed in yellow plexiglass, the color of the substance Alice’s grandmother developed an allergy from, that later led to “a life long disease”.

Through the use of sci-fi imaginary, the artist re-interprets her family history projecting the story both in a near future and a recognizable past, laying the foundations for a transversal reading of the entire research.

Stan Rehearsal - Ensaio para Plataforma de Lançamento, 2020

HD video, 4'52'', Color, Sound

Stan Rehearsal - Ensaio para Plataforma de Lançamento is a small speculative fiction film set on the day the first rocket is launched from the (to-be built) space port in the island of Santa Maria in the Azores archipelago. Taking advantage of the launching event as background, a young group of teenagers from São Miguel film each other dancing to 2020 pop hits.

For Stan Rehearsal, the artist collaborated with four dancers from the Azorean island of São Miguel: Beatriz Viveiros, Maurício Lopes, Nicole Viveiros, and Sofia Rebelo, respectively.

Film installed at Thirdbase Studio Residency Exhibition, 2020

To watch video please contact

Malva Field, Submerged, 2020

Solo show at Lehmann + Silva

Read the exhibition text by Sofia Lemos

The first work pictured, Malva Field, Submerged was illustrated and made in collaboration with Bin Koh

For list of the other works featured please contact

Photos © Dinis Santos / Lehmann + Silva

Mood Keep, 2018

Film installation at Looiersgracht60

HD video, 14', Color. Sound

Pink carpet, pink tungsten light

Mood Keep focuses on the critically endangered Mexican axolotl, a water creature with regenerative abilities that refuses to metamorphose into maturity. In the  lm, set in a near future, axolotls in captivity collectively decide to develop eyelids.

In charting the connections between the axolotl’s post-colonial history, unique - almost unearthly - biology, and recent online popularity as one of the world’s cutest creatures, the work seeks to trace the prevalence of cute imagery in contemporary semiotics.

To watch video please contact

Photos by Sander van Wettum, Sandberg Instituut Graduation 2018