<div>What does a landscape look like when you look at it through a microscope?
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<div>My paintings begin with this question.
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<div>I am an artist based in Lisbon, and for the past several years I have been exploring the natural world at a microscopic scale. Using a microscope to study biological material, I transform tiny structures — cells, tissues, plants and organic forms — into large-scale paintings that exist somewhere between landscape, biology and abstraction.
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<div>This autumn, I have been invited to take part in La Wayaka Current, an artist-led research residency in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
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<div>The Atacama is one of the driest places on Earth, yet it is home to extraordinary forms of life that have adapted to survive in extreme conditions. I will spend several weeks there observing its ecosystems, collecting visual material, studying local flora and learning from the people who have lived with and understood this landscape for generations.
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<div>I want to look closely at plants such as llareta, tamarugo, algarrobo and the remarkable cacti and other species that survive in this environment. I am interested in what happens when we move between scales — from an enormous desert landscape to the microscopic structures within a single plant.
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<div>But beneath this research is a more personal question:
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<div>What does it mean to belong somewhere?
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<div>As a Portuguese national with Chinese, Jewish-German and New Zealand heritage, I have spent much of my adult life moving between countries and cities before returning to Portugal. Increasingly, my work has become a way of thinking about home, intimacy and our relationship with the places we inhabit.
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<div>The Atacama feels like a particularly powerful place to explore these ideas. At first, its landscape can appear almost impossibly alien and inhospitable. Yet it is also home — to plants, animals and communities that have developed extraordinary ways of living within it.
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<div>I want to understand that tension: between unfamiliarity and belonging, fragility and resilience, the enormous and the microscopic.
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<div>This residency is not simply an opportunity to travel somewhere extraordinary. The landscape itself is part of the research.
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<div>I will bring what I discover in Chile back to my studio in Lisbon, where I will spend the following months developing a new body of large-scale paintings from the microscopic forms and visual material I encounter there.
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<div>The journey will therefore continue long after I leave the desert: from field research, to microscope, to studio, to painting, and eventually exhibiting the work produced from this experience.
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<div>Why I need your help
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<div>I am an independent artist, and although I have been invited to participate in the residency, the cost of making the journey to Chile is beyond what I can currently cover on my own.
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<div>I am raising €3,500 to help cover:
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<div>The La Wayaka residency fee
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<div>Flights to and from Chile
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<div>Travel and essential expenses during the residency
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<div>Research and artistic materials
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<div>I have already committed my own savings towards making this possible, but I need additional support to bridge the gap.
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<div>Please help me make this dream come true!
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Luz Amaral Cabral

Anonymous

Jan Moons 4moon

Help me get to the Atacama Desert with La Wayaka Current!

Still €1,699 to go. Help us build momentum.