Maria Miguel Pratas ~ Keywords: absence-wound, olfactory poetics, translation, listening & voicing, in-between, ritual-prayer

Maria Miguel Pratas (Porto, 2002) steers her artistic practice through writing, mixed-media sculpture, sound installations, performative gestures, and analogue imaging methods.

By seeking asymmetric yet reiterated descriptive processes, she explores the emergence of scenic-sculptural elements inherent to voice, incorporating tactile and auditory elements that evoke personal and collective histories. By finding herself at the encounter between word & wound, she aims to bridge linguistic and sensing formats, focusing on scent as an evocative medium. By fostering sensory dialogues around speculative dimensions of care, she attempts to encapsulate the composing & decomposing of notions of grief, in what is found, produced, and imagined.

In close resemblance to her struggle with chronic pain, her work cares for all synonyms of ‘aching’: how its warmth transversely reflects, how it holds memories, and how they can be held by others.

By drafting myth and welding internal (re)callings with external ones, she taps into the symbolic and the ritualistic, discerning in which ways (y)our hands can articulate signified objects of critical fabulation. Through collaboration, she deepens the contextual relevance of her projects, igniting tangible reflection and ensuring resonance at a distance. Grounded in both empirical exploration and theoretical research, Pratas’s work engages with histories of materiality and cultural memory.

Pratas holds a BA in Sound and Image from the School of Arts – Universidade Católica Portuguesa (2023) and an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute (2025).

*Learn more about Maria Miguel Pratas' 20 minute performance desire hums into silver ~ a rehearsal for a prayer for CHOREIA ~ DAI's Aeroponic Acts 2025 at Centrale Fies in Italy. 

*Learn more about Maria Miguel Pratas' written MA thesis (DAI, 2025): The absence-wound: Bucolic mannerisms or the aftermath of affection?

*During their journey with DAI, Maria Miguel Pratas made significant contributions to: COOP Summit 2024 ~ …And Then I Opened My Mouth as well as COOP Summit 2025 ~ [WE SEARCHED SO MUCH IN ERRATIC WAYS]

*Follow Maria's 'Life after DAI' via instagram