The artistic and social project CORPOEMCADEIA 26/27 began this year in two new Portuguese prisons: Vale de Judeus Prison and Odemira Women’s Prison.
The first sessions began in March in Vale de Judeus with a group of 16 male inmates, and more recently, in May, they got underway in Odemira with a group of 16 women. The project will run over two years, from 2026 to 2027, with a number of public events, meetings, exhibitions and two performances planned.
Based on a model that combines contemporary dance with a therapeutic-somatic approach informed by Gestalt psychotherapy, the project offers a programme of collective action and reflection involving artists, psychotherapists and the prison community. The dancer and creator Catarina Câmara is the artistic director of the project, which, in both prisons, involves artists and therapists, thus ensuring an approach that is simultaneously aesthetic, therapeutic and social.
Throughout the sessions, spaces for encounter are created where participants experience tensions, boundaries and ethical dilemmas through movement and contact with others. The project aims to address the issue of crime and the complexity of structures of violence (physical, psychological, institutional and cultural) in a restorative and transformative manner. The artistic processes developed culminate in creations that bring to light a reality that is often hidden, fostering encounters between the prison community and civil society.
CORPOEMCADEIA thus forms part of the field of artistic practices aimed at social inclusion and transformation. The project promotes access to and cultural participation for people in prison, creating the conditions for the development of human potential and dignity.
On Friday 29 May, the book corpoemcadeia: arte, prisão e gestalt will be launched at the Lisbon Book Fair, followed by a discussion with the author Catarina Câmara and the journalist Ana Cristina Pereira.
The 2026/2027 edition of CORPOEMCADEIA is organised by the Creative Connection Association, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Directorate-General for Reintegration and Prison Services, and a network of artistic, social and academic partners. The project was launched in 2019 at Linhó Prison as part of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s PARTIS initiative – Artistic Practices for Social Inclusion. Its implementation at Linhó and, more recently, at the Padre António Oliveira Educational Centre in Caxias, is organised by the Olga Roriz Company.
For further information, please contact:
Rita Bonifácio | 918453750 | ritabonifacio@paristexas.pt
About the project
CORPOEMCADEIA aims to uphold the dignity of and raise the profile of people deprived of their liberty, contributing to the humanisation of prisons and fostering critical thinking about the prison system and structures of violence.
The project’s methodologies constitute a dynamic field of research, in which the theoretical and practical models of Contemporary Dance and Gestalt Psychotherapy complement and enhance one another through listening centred on the ‘here and now’. The work is developed by a co-creative duo — an artist and a psychotherapist — integrating aesthetic, therapeutic and social practices in an approach that is simultaneously poetic, ethical and political.
Catarina Câmara: artistic director
Dancer, creator, educator and research associate at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Sciences, Faculty of Law, University of Lisbon. She holds a degree in Law (FDUL) and in Dance (ESD-IPL), with training in Restorative Justice (EFRJ – Belgium and ISCSP) and as a counsellor in Gestalt Psychotherapy (IFG – Italy). Her work revolves around artistic practices centred on the body and relationships, the ethics of care, and alternative models to traditional justice, such as restorative and transformative justice. She develops and implements artistic and participatory methodologies within a movement to integrate the poetic, political and psychosocial dimensions of the body, applied in various community and institutional contexts – schools, prisons, universities and cultural institutions. Since 2019, she has directed CORPOEMCADEIA, an artistic project for social inclusion, developed within a prison setting. She has published articles in newspapers and is the author of the book corpoemcadeia – Dança, Prisão e Gestalt: Práticas Além do Bem e do Mal, published in 2026 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.