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Hḗrā was born in Lisbon, Portugal on 19 September 1995. They spent their childhood in Portugal and completed high school at the Escola Profissional de Teatro de Cascais, where they studied performing arts for three years. In 2018, Hḗrā was diagnosed HIV+ and, at the same time, immigrated to London, experiences that have deeply informed both their personal and artistic practice.
Hḗrā is a trans, HIV+ creative practitioner and activist whose work spans poetry, performance, visual arts, and installation. Their practice explores themes of gender, identity, trauma, memory, ecology, and movement, using a range of mediums to craft an experimental, biographical expression layered with abstraction. Hḗrā’s artistic journey navigates the intersections of these complex themes, offering a deep and nuanced exploration of both personal and societal narratives.
They are also a workshop facilitator working at the intersection of social change, wellbeing, and queerness, creating spaces for dialogue, reflection, and collective transformation. They have delivered workshops at organisations including LGBTQ+Center, St. Margaret’s House, Growing U, and Positive East, and are currently developing a holistic practice focused on creative and embodied approaches, primarily with people living with HIV. Hḗrā maintains continuous collaborations with artists Paula Roush and Delaine le Bas, exploring shared research, performance, and socially engaged projects.
My practice engages questions of identity, trauma, and marginalisation through a transdisciplinary approach spanning visual art, performance, publishing, and socially engaged work. As a trans-femme artist, I draw on lived experience to examine how systemic structures — medical, political, architectural, and ecological — regulate and mark the body. Personal experience functions not as confession, but as a method for tracing how power is inscribed, administered, and resisted.
Working with photo-narrative, performance, sound, and installation, I re-stage trauma through processes of ritual, role-play, and embodied methodologies such as Photo-Therapy, movement, voice, and spatial intervention. These practices allow for forms of repair, re-authorship, and embodied agency to emerge. Across my work, I challenge fixed ideas of gender, naturalism, and authorship, foregrounding self-representation as both a political strategy and a practice of care.
Ugly Duck – Follow Y/our River (2025) is one example of this approach. The live performance and installation explores gender transition, place-based memory, and the bureaucratic architectures that govern identity. Developed through site-specific research along East London’s River Lea, the work draws parallels between the river’s continual transformation and the embodied liminality of trans becoming. Informed by my HIV+ status, the performance incorporates medical documentation and personal text to address visibility, stigma, and survival within institutional systems of care. Using sewn photographic prints, body scans, archival textiles, found instruments, and field recordings, the work unfolds as a tactile and sonic ritual. Voice, sound, and gesture activate an evolving archive shaped by loss, care, and reclamation, creating a temporary space of queer resistance where transition is held, heard, and remembered. The work was presented as a 50-minute performance and installation at Ugly. Duck
Architectures of Failure (2025), developed for The Flip Side of the Coin, extends this inquiry into the spatial and institutional conditions that shape access, visibility, and belonging. Working across performance and installation, the project examines how bodies are disciplined through architectural design and bureaucratic systems, using the bathroom and the gallery as sites where care and control intersect. A domestic bathroom becomes a threshold space where private acts of self-maintenance are rendered visible yet inaccessible, mirroring the contemporary policing of trans bodies and the slow violence of exclusion embedded in everyday infrastructures. In the gallery, a toilet physically chained to my body materialises the psychological and material constraints of gendered and institutional categorisation. Through durational action, audience participation, and acts of blockage and rupture, the work stages refusal as a method — proposing failure as a generative strategy for reimagining autonomy, care, and collective responsibility. The work unfolded as a two-hour performance and installation.
The Ruins of HER(A) (2025) expands this investigation into land, ecology, and post-humanism through an exploration of land art and working directly with natural environments. Developed as a two-hour live land art performance, the work is situated within and in dialogue with the ancient, partially submerged ruins of Simena. Using found wood, thread and voice, the performance emerges through direct engagement with the landscape, allowing wind, sun, water, and stone to co-author the work. The ruins — fractured, weathered, and slowly returning to the earth — function as both material and metaphor, positioning the trans body as an archive shaped by occupation, regulation, and endurance. Through poetic narration and embodied presence, the work draws parallels between histories of territorial conquest and the inscription of law and normativity onto bodies. Rejecting ideas of purity, permanence, and ownership, the work proposes a post-human understanding of belonging grounded in reciprocity, ecological time, and persistence: what is submerged is not erased.
Each project appears on my website in the order of the image sequence presented: Ugly Duck – Follow Y/our River(2025), Performance & Installation, 50 minutes, Chemist Gallery; Architectures of Failure (2025), Performance & Installation, 2 hours, The Flip Side of the Coin; and The Ruins of HER(A) (2025), Land Art, 2 hours.