Élia Ramalho

Élia Ramalho was born in Tomar. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts/ Painting from ARCA EUAC and a post-graduation in Aesthetic Communication from the same school. She lives in Coimbra, where she founded the Atelier Multidisciplinar: Salão da Frida. Resorting to painting as primary language, she develops projects that fuse together several types of arts, such as music, visual poetry, theatre and performance. She is taking a PhD degree in Materialities of Literature at the University of Coimbra, and she has been working on the theme “Interaction between text and image in the work of Júlio Pomar”. Her interest in art’s and literature’s criticisms was raised when she began painting, because she considered that both languages complemented each other. This parallelism is at the basis of her research. She has been working actively in the field of pedagogy, and chose O cão que comia a chuva (2016) by Richard Zimler, and the illustrated album Bichos, bichinhos e bicharocos (1948, illustrated by Júlio Pomar and written by Sidônio Muralha, as the main objects of research. Her interest in the multicultural aspect of Portuguese language led her to launch a social project together with the community of Timor and, more recently, an artistic project with a particular focus on sound poetry and performance. She has been collaborating with several students and teachers of the PhD degree in Materialities of Literature in several artistic projects. One of these projects took place in 2021, and benefited from the support of the University of Coimbra. The installation and performance “A Humanidade no Livro d’O desassossego“, based on the Arquivo LdoD created by Professor Manuel Portela, was presented in the Biblioteca Joanina. Élia Ramalho has been exploring connections between her painting and the work of several musicians ― as well as other artists in the field of audio-visual arts ― through several performances hosted by her atelier.